The Keys of Serravalle

The library is the most beautiful room Samantha has ever been asked to undress in, and she has, as of this year, been asked to undress in quite a few.

It’s two stories high. Books climb the walls on every side, thousands of them, leather and vellum and cloth gone soft with age, reached by a narrow iron gallery that runs all the way round at half-height. There are two tall windows facing the valley, and between them a long refectory table of dark oak, scarred and polished by centuries of elbows. On the table, set out at even intervals like places at a dinner, are six leather folders, six fountain pens, and six glasses of water.

On the front of each folder, pressed blind into the leather so that you can only read it when the light catches it, is a name.

Samantha finds hers at the far end. Of course she does. Last place at the table. Lot nine, she thinks, always last, and she can’t tell whether the flutter under her ribs is indignation or delight.

Marissa stands at the head of the table with her reading glasses on. Tom sits in a leather armchair by the empty fireplace with his legs crossed, like a man at a recital.

“Sit,” Marissa says.

They sit. The chairs are heavy, carved, high-backed; the linen shifts ride up on the old wood, and Samantha feels the grain of it through the thin fabric against the backs of her thighs.

“In front of you,” Marissa says, “is your agreement. It is thirty-one pages long. It’s the same for each of you, except for Schedule B, which is your own limits, as you gave them to me, in your own words, and which you will check line by line. You have one hour to read it. You may ask me any question you like. You may take anything out that you want out. You may not put anything in, because I’ve already put in everything I want.” The faintest pause. “When you’ve read it, and you’re ready, you’ll come up to this end of the table, one at a time, and sign. Tom will witness. I’ll countersign. From the moment your signature is dry, the Term begins, and it ends at noon on Monday, and not one minute later.”

She looks down the table.

“If you don’t want to sign, don’t. There is a car waiting at the gate, and Paolo will take you to Florence, and there is a room booked for you at a very good hotel until Monday, paid for, and a flight home, and you will never hear one word about it from me or from anyone at the Labyrinth. I mean that. I have put it in writing. It’s clause two.”

She takes her glasses off.

“Begin.”

---

Samantha opens the folder.

She has been reading contracts since she was twenty-three years old, when a restaurant group tried to pay her for a logo in exposure and she went to the library and took out a book called Contract Law for Creatives and read the whole thing in a weekend out of pure spite. She has read contracts that were written by lawyers and contracts written by clients’ nephews. She has read contracts in eight-point type. She has read contracts that were, in the most literal sense, criminal.

She has never read one like this.

It’s set in a clean serif, generously leaded, with wide margins and numbered clauses and not one wasted word. The paper is heavy and faintly textured. On the first page, under the heading, is a single line in italics:

This agreement is written to be understood. If any part of it is not, the fault is the drafter’s, and the Slave may ask.

Samantha reads that line three times. Then she has to look away from the page for a moment, out of the tall window at the valley, because something has happened to her throat.

Then she begins.

---

AGREEMENT FOR SERVICE AT SERRAVALLE

between the Hosts, Mistress Noire and Master Tom; the Guests named in Schedule A; and the Slave named on the cover.

1. The Term. The Term begins at the moment of the Slave’s signature and ends at noon on Monday. At the end of the Term, every obligation in this agreement ends, except the obligations of the Hosts and Guests under Clauses 12 (Photographs), 13 (Discretion) and 18 (Aftercare), which continue forever.

Forever, Samantha notes. Not in perpetuity. Forever. A lawyer who chooses the plainer word when the fancier one is available, and knows exactly why.

2. The Way Out. She reads it. It’s exactly what Marissa said. A car. A hotel. A flight. No questions. It’s signed at the bottom of the clause, separately, already, in Marissa’s fast black hand, as if to say: this part I have promised first.

3. Free Use.

Samantha’s pulse does something complicated.

3.1. By signing, the Slave gives her standing, advance and continuing consent to be touched, displayed, directed, restrained, punished, and used for the sexual pleasure of any Host or Guest, at any time and in any place within the Castle and its grounds during the Term, without any further request or permission, subject only to her Schedule of Limits (Schedule B), the Quiet Hours (Clause 6), and the Safeword (Clause 7).

3.2. “Used” includes, without limitation: the use of her mouth, her hands, her breasts, her sex and, where Schedule B permits, her anus, by fingers, mouths, toys and cocks, in private or in company, singly or together, for as long as the Host or Guest desires, whether or not the Slave is permitted to come.

3.3. The Slave may not refuse any Host or Guest on the grounds of preference, fatigue, or embarrassment. She may refuse only by the Safeword.

3.4. The Slave is reminded that the purpose of this clause is not that she should be used by everyone. It is that she should be available to everyone, and know it, at every moment of the Term. The difference is the whole point.

Samantha stops reading.

She sits with her hands flat on the old oak, and the linen shift, and nothing under it, and reads 3.4 again, and then again, and on the third reading she feels it land between her legs like a hand. Available to everyone, and know it, at every moment. The breakfast table. The corridor. The courtyard in the sun. The long gallery with the statues. Anywhere. Anyone. The not knowing when is the thing, she realizes. Not the use. The waiting for it. The long hour in the car with her hands turned up to the ceiling, stretched to fill a weekend.

She shifts on the carved chair. The wood is warm now. She is very, very aware of the linen, and what it doesn’t cover, and that she has not come in fourteen days.

Across the table, Bella has both hands pressed over her mouth and is reading with enormous eyes. Megan is smiling to herself, the smile of someone rereading a favorite chapter. Sara is reading fast, one finger moving down the margin, professionally. Pet reads without expression, turning the pages at perfectly even intervals, like a metronome.

Veronica is turning the pages with one finger, flicking them over two and three at a time, her chin in her other hand. She catches Samantha looking and mouths, boring.

Down the table, Bella’s right hand has disappeared under the edge of the oak. Samantha sees it go. She sees Bella’s eyes go unfocused on clause 3.2, and her lips part, and her shoulders give one small, guilty twitch.

“Bella,” says Marissa, without looking up from the window.

Bella freezes.

“Both hands on the table, please, where I can see them. Palms down.” A pause. “You haven’t signed yet, so you may do as you like with your own body. But if you’d like to keep doing it, you can do it standing up, at the head of the table, facing the others, so that we can all see how far you get through clause three.”

Bella’s hands come up onto the oak so fast that her glass of water jumps. She lays them flat. Her face has gone the color of a pomegranate from her hairline to the top of her heavy breasts.

“No? Then read.” Marissa turns a page of her own. “Slowly. With your hands where they are. You’ll find it gets more interesting.”

It does. Samantha watches it happen to Bella, and to Megan, and to herself: the reading becomes a kind of slow torture, every clause a new picture, every picture with nowhere to go. Hands flat on the old oak. Thighs pressed together on the carved seats. Six women in thin linen, breathing through their mouths in a silent library while a woman in a white shirt looks out of the window and doesn’t seem to notice them at all.

Samantha goes back to the page.

---

4. Address. The Slave shall address each Guest as Master or Mistress, and each Host likewise. She shall not speak outside the Dormitory except when spoken to, when she is asked a question, or when she uses the Safeword. She shall not look a Host or Guest in the eye unless instructed.

5. The Rings. The Slave shall wear three rings on her collar throughout the Term. A Host may remove a ring from a Slave as a reward. A Slave with one ring fewer may be touched by any Guest, but used only by the Hosts or by a Guest the Hosts designate. A ring removed shall be returned at the next dawn.

So the reward, Samantha thinks, is a few hours of being slightly less available. And the fact that she understands at once why that would be precious makes her face warm.

6. Quiet Hours. The dormitory. One till eight. No guest may enter. This is the Slave’s only privacy. It is also the Hosts’ only promise that she will sleep.

7. The Safeword.

She slows down here. She reads it the way she read Velvet’s rules at the bar five months ago, each one making it realer.

7.1. The Safeword is RED. It stops everything, at once, with anyone, for any reason, without argument or penalty.

7.2. YELLOW means the Slave is approaching a limit. The Host or Guest shall slow, check, and adjust.

7.3. When the Slave cannot speak, she shall hold an object provided to her, and let it fall. No Host or Guest shall gag a Slave without first placing such an object in her hand.

7.4. A Slave who uses the Safeword shall not be punished for it, questioned about it against her wishes, or made to feel by word, look or sulk that she has failed. Any Guest who does any of these things shall leave the Castle within the hour and shall not be invited again. Paolo has been briefed.

Paolo has been briefed. Samantha pictures it: the long black car, the grey suit, a Master of the Velvet Labyrinth in the back seat being driven down the gravel road in total, courteous silence, past three old men on a bench. It’s the funniest thing she has ever read in a legal document, and she has to press her lips together hard, and still something escapes, and at the head of the table Marissa, who has been looking out of the window, glances down the length of it at her.

Their eyes meet. Just for a second. Samantha remembers Clause 4 too late, and drops her gaze to the page, but not before she sees the corner of Marissa’s mouth move, the same way it moved in the courtyard.

---

The rest goes by in a long, dense, delicious hour.

Clause 9, Marks: where, how many, how long they may last, and what may be used to make them, cross-referenced to Schedule B, with a note in italics: The Hosts will inspect every Slave each morning. If a mark is found that should not be there, the Guest who made it will answer to the Hosts, and the answer had better be very good.

Clause 11, Bathing: every Slave showers every night before she sleeps, in the bathhouse, and no Slave may wash herself. Each is washed by another, every inch, to the Hosts’ satisfaction, and answers for how clean she is. Guests may watch. Guests may not assist unless asked.

Clause 12, Photographs: none. None at all. Every phone in the castle, including the Hosts’, in a safe in the steward’s office from six o’clock tonight. The Slave will be looked at more this weekend than at any other time in her life. She will be recorded by no one.

Clause 14, Games: the Slave shall take part in all Games set by the Hosts during the Term, and shall play to win, because a Slave who plays to lose will be punished for it, and a Slave who wins will be rewarded, and a Slave who argues about the rules will be made an example of in a manner the Hosts will find instructive. There is a list of the Games in Schedule C. It’s just a list of names. The Breakfast. The Hunt. The Cellar. The Gallery. The Table. The Chapel. The Palio. The Banquet. The Keys. No descriptions. No rules. Nine names, in a column, in that clean black serif, and Samantha reads down it the way you read the menu at a restaurant you can’t afford.

The Hunt. She thinks of the olive grove she glimpsed from the car, falling away below the walls. Her runner’s legs remember something before her brain does.

The Keys. She puts her hand up to the back of her neck without meaning to.

Clause 16, Assignment: the Hosts may assign a Slave to a single Guest for a stated period, during which the Slave belongs to that Guest alone, as at the auction, and the other Guests shall keep their hands to themselves and their opinions likewise.

Clause 18, Aftercare, which runs to two full pages and includes a list of the things kept in the Dormitory cupboard, down to arnica, chocolate (dark and milk), a hot water bottle, and a copy of Pride and Prejudice, for reasons the Slave will understand if she needs to.

Samantha reads that and stops for a long moment, and doesn’t look up, because she’s certain that if she looks up her face will say something she hasn’t decided to say yet. She told Marissa about Pride and Prejudice once, at the third lunch. The dust jacket. Fifty Shades inside it, at seventeen. She had been making a joke. She hadn’t thought anybody was writing it down.

Somebody was.

---

Schedule B. Limits. In the Slave’s own words.

Hers is two pages. She knows them already; she wrote them. But she reads every line, because that is the instruction, and because she wants to see what she looks like set in someone else’s type.

Hard limits: No blood. No water sports. No fisting. No permanent marks.

Anal: Yes. (Trained daily, four months. Marissa’s note: “She is very diligent. Proceed patiently anyway.”)

Being shared: Yes. With anyone on Schedule A.

Public: Yes.

Humiliation: Yes. Verbal. Including by name. Not including her work.

She had written that last part at her kitchen table at midnight, the third evening. Please don’t make fun of my work. It had seemed like such a small, stupid, vulnerable thing to ask for, among all the rest. Marissa had put it in. Exactly as written. In the same clean serif as everything else, with the same weight, as if it were as serious as no blood.

And then, near the bottom:

Breath play: Discussed. Declined by the Host.

Samantha looks at that line for a long time.

She had ticked discuss in person only on her membership form, a lifetime ago, on a Friday night after a bad date, with a glass of wine. At the second lunch Marissa had asked her about it, in detail, across a white tablecloth, in a low voice: what she’d read, what she imagined, where the want came from. Samantha had answered honestly, with her face on fire. Marissa had listened without comment and written nothing down, and then changed the subject to dessert, and never mentioned it again.

Declined by the Host.

Samantha puts her hand up.

It’s absurd, she knows it’s absurd, she’s a twenty-seven-year-old woman sitting naked under a linen shift in a castle library with her hand up like it’s tenth-grade chemistry. But it’s what the body does when it has a question and has been told there are rules about speaking.

Marissa looks at her. “Samantha.”

“Schedule B, Mistress. The last line.”

“Yes.”

“You declined it.”

“I did.”

“May I ask why?”

The whole table has gone quiet. Five women have stopped reading. Tom, in his armchair, has put his fingers together under his chin.

Marissa takes her reading glasses off. She folds them, and sets them on the table in front of her, very precisely, parallel to the edge of the oak.

“Because I want you back,” she says.

That’s all. She doesn’t elaborate. She puts her glasses back on, and looks down at her own folder, and turns a page, and Samantha sits with her hand still half raised in the air, and slowly lowers it, and finds that her eyes have filled, suddenly and inexplicably, and that she has to look very hard at the grain of the wood until they stop.

---

It’s on page twenty-eight that she finds it.

Clause nineteen. Miscellaneous. The part of every contract nobody reads, the attic of the document, where the lawyers keep severability and governing law and notices and all the furniture they don’t use. She reads it anyway, because she always reads it, because once, in a font license, she found a clause in the miscellaneous section that saved a client eleven thousand dollars.

19.1. Severability. Fine.

19.2. Entire agreement. Fine.

19.3. Headings are for convenience only. Fine.

19.4. The Slave who has read this sub-clause shall say nothing of it to the other Slaves before they sign, and shall say the word “Serravalle” to the Host at the moment she signs. In consideration, she shall be excused one punishment of her choosing, on request, at any time during the Term. Any Slave who signs without saying the word shall be deemed to have waived her right to read this agreement with care, and shall receive, immediately after the last signature, twelve strokes of the strap, to be counted aloud by those who did.

19.5. Notices. Fine.

Samantha reads 19.4 four times.

Then she lifts her eyes, very carefully, without moving her head, and looks down the table.

Bella is on page twelve, lips moving. Megan is on page twenty, smiling. Sara is on page thirty, reading Schedule C, one finger on the list of games. Veronica has closed her folder entirely and is examining her nails.

Pet is on page twenty-eight.

Pet is looking at her.

It’s just a flick of the eyes, across the table, over the top of her folder. Pale blue eyes, in that pale face with the dark knotwork climbing up out of the neckline of the shift to the hinge of her jaw. It holds for exactly one second. There’s nothing in it. No complicity. No warning. Just information: I know. And now I know you know.

Then Pet looks down and turns the page.

Shall say nothing of it to the other Slaves.

Samantha looks at Veronica, flicking a speck of something from her thumbnail. At Bella, twenty-one, mouthing the words of Clause 12 as she reads them. At Megan, who hugged her with both arms. At Sara, who was a birthday present and said it with a straight face.

She could say it. She could just say it. Page twenty-eight. Three words. They would all turn to it at once, and four people would be spared twelve strokes, and she would have broken the first rule she’d been given before she’d even signed.

She thinks about the collar. The box that said open, not put on. How easy it is to do more than you were told, and call it devotion.

She doesn’t say it.

She reads to the end. She reads Schedule A, the names of the guests, twelve of them, and some she knows and some she doesn’t: Mistress Velvet. Tanya. Master Rob. Master Jonah. Master Douglas. Her pulse jumps and settles. Gabriella. Marcus and Elle. Catherine and Leo. John. She almost laughs out loud at that one. The good kind. And at the bottom, set a little apart from the others:

Signora Lucia Ferrante, of Serravalle, who does not play, and sees everything.

Samantha closes the folder.

---

“Pet,” Marissa says. “You first.”

Pet rises. She goes to the head of the table, where Tom has come to stand with a black fountain pen held out, cap off. She stands in front of Marissa and waits.

“Parties sign,” Marissa says, “as they intend to perform.”

Pet understands before any of them. She crosses her arms, takes the hem of the linen shift, and draws it up over her head in one movement, and lets it fall behind her on the floor. And she stands there in front of the long table in nothing but her collar and her ink, and it’s the first time Samantha has seen all of it at once in daylight: the knotwork running down from her throat over her small breasts, round her ribs, over her hips, down both legs to the ankles, never breaking, never ending, a single line that has been drawn and drawn and drawn. It’s the most beautiful thing Samantha has ever seen on a body. She understands, suddenly, why someone would want to own this. And why someone would be afraid to.

Pet takes the pen from Tom. She bends over the folder. She signs.

And as the nib leaves the paper, she lifts her eyes to Marissa’s, which Clause 4 does not permit, and says, very clearly, “Serravalle.”

Something passes over Marissa’s face. Surprise, Samantha thinks. Then something warmer than surprise, quickly put away.

“Thank you, Pet,” Marissa says, and countersigns.

Tom signs as witness. Pet walks back to her place and sits, naked, with her hands in her lap, and doesn’t look at Samantha once.

The others go up one by one.

Megan, smiling, pulling her shift off with the unself-consciousness of a woman who has been naked in front of Tom more often than clothed; she signs with a flourish and says nothing but “Thank you, Mistress.” Sara, tall and dark and muscled, who pauses for a half-second with the pen above the page, frowning, as if something has just tugged at her memory, and then signs. Bella, pink from her collarbones up, her heavy breasts bouncing as she wriggles out of the linen, who signs her name with a little heart over the i and then covers her mouth in horror and says, “Sorry! Sorry, Mistress, habit,” and Marissa says, “It’s binding either way.”

Veronica strolls up. Pulls off the shift. Stands there with her hands on her hips, in nothing but a white leather collar, her small hard body tanned and compact, a gold stud glinting in one nipple and, lower down, where she is very smooth, a tiny gold charm catching the light: a bumblebee. She takes the pen from Tom with a little bow. She flips her folder straight to the last page without looking at a single one of the thirty others, and signs a long, looping signature with enormous confidence, and hands the pen back.

“Done,” she says.

And then there is only Samantha.

---

She walks the length of the table. It’s about twenty feet. It feels like the length of the stage at the auction, that same walk into the light, with every eye in the room on her.

She stops in front of Marissa. Tom holds out the pen.

She takes hold of the hem of the linen shift. She lifts it over her head, and the cool air of the library moves over her whole body at once, and she lets the shift drop, and stands there in her collar with the little silver lock at the back of it, and nothing else, and her nipples are so hard they ache, and she is so wet that she can feel it on the insides of her thighs, and everyone in the room can see both.

She takes the pen. It’s heavy, warm from Tom’s hand. She bends over the page. There’s the line, and under it her name in that clean black serif.

She signs. Her real signature, the one on her lease and her passport, the one she practiced at fourteen until it looked like someone she wanted to be.

And as the nib lifts, she raises her eyes, and says, very quietly, “Serravalle, Mistress.”

Marissa doesn’t say anything for a moment.

Then she takes the pen from Samantha’s fingers, and countersigns, and Samantha watches the black ink go down beside her own, the fast upright hand beside her careful one. And Tom signs as witness. And it’s done.

“The Term,” Marissa says, “has begun.”

---

“Nineteen point four,” Marissa says, to the table, in the same voice she’d use to read out a date. “Page twenty-eight. Would anyone like to hear it?”

Four faces turn to her.

She reads it. Slowly. Every word.

There’s a silence. Then Veronica says, “That’s entrapment.”

“It’s disclosure,” says Marissa. “It was on page twenty-eight of a document you were given an hour to read and told to read, in the same type as everything else, with a heading. Two of you found it. I’d call that a fair test.” She turns to Sara. “You nearly had it.”

“I skim for a living,” Sara says. “I’m a paralegal.” A beat. “I will never skim again.”

“I know you won’t,” says Marissa. “That’s what the strap is for. Up. All four of you. Along the table, please. Bend over it. Arms out.”

They go. It’s extraordinary to watch. Megan goes easily, with a small sigh that isn’t unhappy at all. Sara goes with her jaw set, like a sprinter walking back to the blocks after a false start. Bella goes with her hands over her face, giggling in pure terror. Veronica goes last, rolling her eyes so elaborately it’s visible from behind, and folds herself over the old oak beside the others, and turns her head on her outstretched arm, and looks straight down the table at Samantha.

Four bare backsides in a row along the edge of a six-hundred-year-old table, pale and dark and freckled and tanned, and four pairs of legs, and between them, where the table’s edge presses into four sets of hips, everything, on display to the room.

Tom has gone to a cabinet by the fireplace. He comes back with two straps: thick, supple leather, about two feet long, split at the end into two tails.

“Pet. Samantha.” Marissa takes one strap from Tom. “You’ll stand at the end of the table where they can see you, and you’ll count. Aloud. Together. For each of them in turn.”

Samantha’s mouth goes dry.

This is the part, she realizes, that Marissa wrote the clause for. Not the strokes. The counting. The two who read it, standing clothed in nothing but their own diligence, counting out loud the price of the others not reading it. And Veronica, who will hear Samantha’s voice every time.

She goes to the end of the table. Pet comes and stands beside her. Their shoulders are six inches apart. Neither of them looks at the other.

Tom goes to Megan first. He rests a hand on the small of her back, and says something low that makes her nod, and then he steps back, and the strap goes up, and comes down, with a sound like a thick book being slammed shut.

Megan gasps.

“One,” say Samantha and Pet together.

It’s a strange sound, their two voices. Pet’s is soft and very clear. Samantha’s is lower, rougher. On one they don’t quite match. On two they’re closer. By five they’ve found each other, and they’re speaking as one voice, and Samantha has never in her life felt so complicit in anything.

Marissa takes Sara. Sara takes her twelve in total silence, jaw clenched, knuckles white on the far edge of the table, until the ninth, which draws a sharp hiss through her teeth, and the eleventh, which draws a word Samantha didn’t know Sara knew, and the twelfth, which is the hardest, and after which Sara says, into the oak, very distinctly, “I will never skim again,” and Marissa says, “No, I don’t think you will.”

Bella cries. Not from pain, or not only. From the enormity of it. From four people watching and two counting. She counts along under her breath, too, a half-beat behind them, textbook, sobbing, and at twelve she says “Thank you, Master” to Tom so earnestly that Tom has to turn away for a second and compose himself.

And then Veronica.

Marissa goes to her. She stands over her for a moment, looking down at that compact, tanned, insolent body folded over the table, the bumblebee glinting between her thighs. She doesn’t say anything. She lifts the strap.

The first stroke is hard. Much harder than the others. It cracks off the stone walls and the leather-bound books and comes back.

Veronica doesn’t make a sound.

“One,” say Samantha and Pet.

Veronica turns her head on her arm and looks straight at Samantha down the length of the table. Her eyes are bright and hot. Not with tears. With something else. And on two, when the strap lands again and Samantha’s voice says the number in unison with Pet’s, Veronica’s lips move, silently, forming the word along with them.

She counts with them. Every stroke. Looking at Samantha. Mouthing the numbers, a half-beat ahead, as if daring the voices to catch up. By six her backside is a deep, even crimson. By nine her knees are trembling and her hands have closed into fists on the oak. By eleven there’s a sound in her throat, finally, small and raw, and something shining on the insides of her thighs that isn’t sweat. And on twelve, when Marissa brings the strap down with everything behind it, Veronica’s whole body jolts against the table and she cries out, loud, a real cry, and then laughs, breathlessly, into her arm.

“You counted,” Marissa says, looking down at her. It’s the first thing she’s said to her.

“Somebody had to keep them honest, Mistress,” Veronica says, muffled, into the wood.

Marissa looks at her a moment longer. Then, briefly, she lays her palm flat on the burning skin. Just for a second. And takes it away.

She doesn’t tell them to get up.

She walks instead along the backs of the four of them, slowly, the strap hanging from her hand, looking down at what she and Tom have made: four bare backsides glowing from pink to crimson in a row along the edge of the table, four pairs of thighs trembling, four sets of everything on display between them.

“Pet. Samantha,” she says. “You counted. Now you’ll inspect.”

Samantha doesn’t understand. Then she does, and her whole body goes hot.

“Each of them,” Marissa says. “Two fingers. All the way in. And then you’ll tell me, out loud, which of them is wettest.” She lets that sit. “A punishment is meant to correct. If one of them has enjoyed hers more than she should, I’d like to know about it.”

Samantha goes to Bella, because Bella is nearest, and because she can’t yet make herself go to the end of the table.

Bella is hot to the touch. Her skin under the stripes is burning. She gasps when Samantha’s hand rests on her hip, and gasps again, higher, when Samantha’s fingers find her, and Samantha has never done this before, never in her life put her fingers into a woman who couldn’t see her face, and she does it slowly, and Bella is slick and swollen and clenches around her at once, hungrily, and makes a small helpless noise and says, “Oh—sorry—sorry—” to the table, and Samantha draws her fingers out and finds them shining to the knuckle.

Then Veronica.

She stands behind her. The deep even crimson of twelve hard strokes. The small, compact, muscled body folded over the old oak, the cheek on the forearm, the dark eyes turned back toward her along the table. Veronica is watching her come. Of course she is. And as Samantha lays her left hand on the hot skin of her hip, Veronica smiles, very slightly, and shifts her feet a fraction wider apart on the floor.

Samantha slides two fingers into her.

It is like putting her hand into warm oil. Veronica is soaked, so wet that there is no resistance at all, so wet it’s running, and the moment Samantha is inside her she clenches down, deliberately, hard, once, twice, gripping Samantha’s fingers like a fist, and lets out a long, low, shameless moan that echoes off the books.

The whole library hears it.

Samantha draws her fingers out. They are wet to the palm.

“Well?” says Marissa.

She thinks about lying. She thinks about it for perhaps half a second. Then she thinks about the line on the first page of the agreement, written to be understood, and about whose hand it was written in.

“Veronica, Mistress,” she says.

“Pet?”

“Veronica, Mistress,” says Pet quietly.

“So she enjoyed it.” Marissa looks down at the crimson backside, and at the bumblebee, and at the slick shine on the insides of Veronica’s thighs. “I thought she might. She’ll have four more, then, to remind her that it wasn’t meant for her pleasure.” She turns, and holds out the strap, handle first.

Not to Tom.

To Samantha.

“From the girl who reported her,” Marissa says. “Count them yourself.”

Samantha takes the strap. It’s heavier than it looks. The leather is warm from Marissa’s hand. She stands behind Veronica with it hanging from her fist and realizes she has no idea how to do this, none, and that five women and a man and a Mistress are watching her not know, and that Veronica, folded over the table with her cheek on her arm, is looking back at her with an expression of absolute, glittering triumph.

Punishment’s just attention with a strap on it.

She did this on purpose, Samantha understands. She made herself the wettest. She clenched like that, and moaned like that, so that the whole room would hear it, so that this would happen, so that it would be Samantha.

Something hot and unfamiliar goes through Samantha, and it isn’t only arousal.

She lifts the strap and brings it down.

It isn’t hard enough. She knows it the moment it lands; it makes a flat, apologetic sound, and Veronica laughs into her arm.

“One,” Samantha says.

“That doesn’t count,” says Marissa. “Again.”

So she does it again, properly this time, with her whole arm, the way she watched Marissa do it, and the strap cracks off the bookshelves, and Veronica’s whole body jolts against the oak and her laugh breaks off into a sharp, real cry.

“One,” Samantha says. Her voice shakes.

Two. Three. Each one harder. Each one landing on stripes that were already there, so that Veronica cries out louder each time, and her heels come up off the floor, and between her legs, in plain view of the room, she gets wetter. Samantha can see it. Everybody can see it. On three, Veronica turns her head and looks back at her with her eyes swimming and her mouth open and says, hoarsely, “Harder, Lot Nine,” which is not permitted, and which Marissa allows.

Four is the hardest thing Samantha has ever done with her body. It lands across the crease where Veronica’s thighs meet her backside, and Veronica screams, and her fists bang once on the oak, and then she goes limp over the table, panting, shaking, glistening to the knees, and she is grinning.

“Four,” says Samantha, and lets the strap hang, and finds that her own thighs are wet to the knees too, and that her arm is trembling, and that she has never in her life been so angry and so turned on at once.

Marissa takes the strap back from her, gently.

“Thank her,” she says to Veronica.

Veronica lifts her head off her arm. Her face is blotched and wet and blazing.

“Thank you, Lot Nine,” she says, and it is the most intimate thing anyone has ever said to Samantha.

“Up,” says Marissa. “All of you.”

---

They straighten. They stand along the table, four flushed, trembling women and two unmarked ones, all naked, all collared, all with that same bright wet shine in their eyes, and Marissa walks slowly along the line, looking at each of them, and then she comes to the end, to Samantha.

“Clause three,” she says, “is now in force.”

And she reaches out, and this time she doesn’t stop.

Her fingers slide between Samantha’s legs, and into her, two of them, without ceremony, without a pause, all the way, and Samantha makes a sound that she has never made in front of anyone, not in the stocks, not in the Green Room, not in her own bed alone with the door locked. Fourteen days. Fourteen days of not yet and one long hour of not now and a single inch of air in a sunlit courtyard, and all of it breaks over her at once and she grabs at the edge of the table behind her to stay on her feet.

Marissa’s fingers move. Slowly. Deep. Her thumb finds Samantha’s clit, already swollen, already so sensitive that the first pass of it makes her knees go, and circles, and circles.

“This,” Marissa says, conversationally, to the room, “is what fourteen days looks like.” She crooks her fingers, slowly, deliberately, and in the silence of the library everyone can hear exactly how wet Samantha is. “Listen to her. She’s dripping on Signora Ferrante’s floor, and I have barely begun.”

Samantha is shaking. She can feel the others watching. Pet, six inches away, very still. Veronica, with her striped backside and her bright eyes. Bella, both hands over her mouth again. She can feel her own wetness running down Marissa’s wrist. She’s going to come. She’s going to come in about four seconds, right here, standing, in the library, in front of all of them, and there is nothing in her that could stop it—

The fingers stop. They stay inside her, perfectly still. The thumb lifts away.

Samantha sobs.

“Not mine,” Marissa says, close to her ear. “Not this one. Read three point one again when you have a moment.” The fingers withdraw, slowly, and Samantha feels every millimeter. “Any Host or Guest. Whoever gives you your first this weekend will be the one who decides to. And you won’t know who it is until they do.” She holds up her hand in the gold light from the window, glistening to the knuckles, and looks at it, and then, very deliberately, not taking her eyes from Samantha’s, she wipes it clean on the white linen of Samantha’s discarded shift where it lies on the table.

“I don’t think it’ll take them long,” Marissa says.

From somewhere in the depths of the castle, a bell rings twice. A car door slams in the courtyard. A woman’s voice, warm and amused and entirely familiar, calls something in the hall.

“That’ll be Tanya,” says Tom, looking at his watch. “Right on time.”

Marissa turns away and picks up the six signed folders and squares them into a stack, edge to edge, like a woman closing a file.

“Go with her,” she says to the six of them, without looking back. “She’s going to get you ready.”