Bound and Initiated (12 page)

Claudia stood again and walked three paces forward so that she stood on the other side of that mosaic scene, of which Sarah, lying with her cheek now upon the floor itself, could see only colored tiles glittering in the red glow of the fire. She stood with her right side to Sarah, and made a sort of ritual gesture of showing with her left hand, as if inviting Sarah to contemplate the fire, perhaps a hundred feet away from her, that shot its flames toward the unseen ceiling.

“The fire,” she said very solemnly, “divides this sacred hall in two, columba. The part in which we are now is called the Hall of Initiation, and the part on the other side of the first is called the Hall of Mithras. Once you have reached the first degree, it is permitted that you serve your masters at their banquets in the Hall of Mithras, but as a columba, and as a nupta, your place is here in the Hall of Initiation. As you wait for Pater Robert, your master, contemplate the fire, and imagine the blessed place that lies beyond it, the place of your masters, where they feast in joy and partake of every pleasure men can feel. Consider how above all they enjoy the pleasure provided to them by the tender bodies of such as you. Consider how when a true man’s lust rises as hot as a burning fire, and as mighty as a raging bull, he must have his way with a girl, in her mouth, and between her legs, and in her shapely hindquarters, until the lust has passed from him and reason has returned.”

Claudia looked for a long moment at the fire. Sarah’s pussy burned between her bound thighs at the lewd thoughts couched in such formal words. Her breathing came in little gasps.

Claudia turned back. “Consider, columba, how you were made by nature to serve a true man’s pleasure, and to allow him to quench his desire inside the secret places of your sweet body, made submissive to the force of his strong one. When your master comes to you here, to take you to the chamber where he will enjoy you, remember that what he will do to you is for his pleasure, and not for yours, and be grateful that the fire of his lust burns for you, that his manhood grows hard at the sight of you, and that he sees fit to initiate you into these mysteries with that manhood. When he arranges you for his use, when he thrusts himself inside you, and when he pours his seed within your secret places, you will know at last what you truly are.”

Claudia turned and, without looking at Sarah again, walked back around her toward the double doors. Her footsteps receded behind Sarah’s back, and then Sarah heard the doors close. Who had opened them? she wondered. They must be controlled automatically, somehow. She tried to focus on that technical detail: automatic doors in what the builders had clearly intended to be a place that made you feel like you had traveled deep into the lost world of the Romans and the Persians.
Odd,
she thought.

Then she realized that she had not looked behind her after entering the hall, and that judging from its vast dimensions there must be ample room on either side of the door. Nor would she be able to hear them, for the roaring of the fire, if there should be two doorkeepers who now stood to either side of the double doors behind her back, looking at Sarah as she lay bound and naked here on the floor.
Pater Robert? Kevin and Alex? All three, with many other red-robed men?

The question of who, if anyone, loomed behind her to either side of the double doors, quickly pushed out every other thought. She began to feel that she must roll over and back toward the door, or she would go mad trying to listen through the noise of the enormous, distant fire to discern the breathing or the shuffling feet of the men who
must
be there.

She must watch the fire. Why did it matter if a hundred red-robed men stood there behind her? Her fate would be the same now, wouldn’t it? The same as the fate of the girl on the video; the same as Claudia, her domina, had just told to her.

Somehow, though, the idea that Sarah might not merely be observed while bound and naked but that she might never even know what men saw her that way, what men stood in the shadows, their cocks in their hands, taking pleasure in the sight of Sarah’s body provided for their lascivious gaze, robbed her of her wits more thoroughly than this strange ritual had done before. Claudia had told Sarah she would be displayed for masculine eyes even while the woman Sarah now called
domina
had still maintained the fiction of the sadomasochistic escort service, before the signatures and the punishment strap. But she had seemed then to paint the scene of lewd display as something Sarah might feel some control over at least in knowing whose eyes saw her naked, bound body. Now, the unknown, with its fear and its terrible excitement, had taken hold.

The fire. She must consider the fire. Whoever loomed in the shadows simply constituted part of what Claudia had said to Sarah about learning who she truly was. The fire formed the center of this hall. The fire divided man from initiate, man from beast, man from girl. If two men did stand behind her, they must see further than she could, and they must know what lay on the other side of the fire, in the hall where Sarah would it appeared someday serve the men who wore the red robes. Perhaps it was only fitting that they should gaze upon her, unseen themselves.

If it is part of the ritual, it must be right. Just as it must be right for a man to come to me here, to take me to a special chamber where he will make himself my master, with his hands and with his cock.
The thought came to her unbidden, and a long moment went by before Sarah realized that the comfort it gave her to think of herself as already mastered by the ritual before a man laid a dominant hand upon her shouldn’t console her at all.

The fire roared. It didn’t crackle, which must mean that it burned some other fuel besides wood. Natural gas, from deep below? How deep below Manhattan were they?

Sarah looked into the flames, fighting to concentrate on details like the source of the fire’s fuel. That was what an analyst did, and Sarah James remained an analyst. But soon… soon her master would come, and teach Sarah her true nature. Claudia had said it. The man wore beautiful suits, and he stood at the first degree.

The orange and the red, tongues reaching for a ceiling that must be at least a hundred feet above them, fascinated. Sarah began to think that she belonged to the fire. She began to think that men were in the flames, unburnt, and that the men who must stand behind her, holding torches, were themselves the torches, burning to light Sarah’s way to the place where she would be mastered.

Who am I?
Sarah wondered, and for seconds that seemed to go on forever the question was not speculative but real; the girl who lay on the warm stone floor, gazing into the fire, didn’t know her name any longer. She thought for a moment she might be a girl in a book, who yearned for a wealthy man to bend her to his will, and to take care of her.
A forever girl… yes, I’m a forever girl. Just like this fire is a forever fire.

No, wait. I’m not a girl at all, am I?
Columba. Dove. A delicate, gentle animal, but bound like a wild beast with circles of leather—a collar and a belt and cuffs. Why bind a dove this way? Why treat a tender dove like a mighty bull?

The fire showed her, didn’t it? Such a useful, warming thing—sweet and gentle, in a candle flame or an oil lamp—but so terrible, if you let it go.

Am I the fire?
Something in her mind still struggled desperately to tell her that these thoughts made sense only mystically, and that she must not let them overwhelm her and steal her intelligence. But to a girl lying naked and bound on the floor, waiting for a man to come and claim her with his cock, the magnificent, jumbled ideas gave a comfort that even a brilliant mind like Sarah’s found nearly impossible to resist.

I am the fire, and he will tame me, and teach me. I will please him, and he will be kind to me.

A bell rang above her, with a single chime. Its muddy sound, full of overtones, struck Sarah’s ear as ancient—as the aural counterpart to the sight of the fire.

“
Nox est,
” said a deep masculine voice in a solemn tone that seemed to grow from the ringing of the bell, as if he
were
the bell.

“
Tempus est,
” said another, very different voice, not as deep and somehow more distinctly human.

Then the double doors banged open.

“
Pater sum,
” a third voice said. “
Adsum fututurus
.”

His steps echoed on the stone as he approached from behind her with a kind of slapping sound, as if he wore not shoes but sandals. He stood behind her, and Sarah couldn’t help the little whimper she emitted, picturing him looking down at her. Was his cock in his hand? Did he like what he saw? Was he wearing that tailored suit?

She heard a slight rustling, and then she felt his big hand on her bottom, just holding her there in his fingers and his palm. Sarah whimpered again, more loudly, at the way he seemed to possess her with the simple gesture.

“
Salve, o columba,
” came his voice, the third voice, exquisite in its cultured patrician accent, not too deep and not too high, but endlessly rich. “That means
Hello.
You reply,
salve, o pater.
”

“
Salve, o pater,
” Sarah whispered to the fire.

“The first janitor—that means
doorkeeper—
said,
nox est:
it is night. The second janitor said,
tempus est:
it is time.” He paused and began to rub her bottom gently, softly working his middle two fingers inside the little crease there at the center, so that Sarah had to moan long and low. “Then I said,
Pater sum:
I am a pater, and
adsum fututurus.
” He paused again; now his fingers pushed further, he found her clit, and caressed her there until Sarah cried out with the forced pleasure. Pater Robert said, “I am here to fuck.”

“Oh, God,” Sarah whispered. “Please…” The long wait on the coffee table, and the long wait on the floor in front of the fire, seemed to have tuned her body’s erotic responsiveness to a level Sarah had never imagined it might reach. She felt like her whole body was aflame.
I am the fire.
She felt like she would come, in an instant, if her master would just…

The hand left her, and suddenly he had picked her up in his arms, cradling her like a little child, or like a bride who would be carried over the threshold. She could see his face, but he did not look down into her eyes; instead his own eyes roamed her naked, bound body. Never had Sarah felt anything like the emotions she felt then: she wasn’t safe—she knew she stood in more danger than she ever had in her life—but she couldn’t persuade herself not to
feel
safe. Something about the way he held her little body against his big one; something about the way he looked at her as a treasure to be secured and enjoyed; they made her feel that despite all indications, he would not harm her, nor let anyone else do so.

At last Pater Robert’s piercing blue eyes met Sarah’s. He smiled, and though her mind continued to cry out against the strange trust that had bloomed unaccountably inside her, she could not help knowing, absolutely, that to rely upon his basic decency made perfect sense.

He’s a member of an international criminal conspiracy that’s attempting to bring down civilization as we know it. He’s about to bind you to columns, to a bench, like on that lewd mosaic, and take your virginity though you never offered it to him. He just said, “I come to fuck,” and he meant you. How can you possibly feel this way?

Brainwashing, yes, whatever that meant, but at every step the
Forever Girl
part of Sarah James had said
Yes
, with her body and with a part of her soul that she had never, ever let loose before—the part that had watched the video in the Langley briefing room knowing that what she saw called out to her in a way that made her terribly, shamefully warm and wet between her thighs, and knowing that no one else at the CIA could infiltrate the League of Mithras as well as she could, for that reason.

There, of course, lay the true danger, as she looked up into the face of this man named Robert, her cheek against the soft silk of the voluminous long red robe that she now saw had a golden clasp at his neck and a capacious hood that made her think of medieval romance stories—hidden kings and noble causes. And inside the hood a chiseled face, manly without the slightest hint of coarseness, wearing an expression that seemed to say that Sarah could not have a thought or a feeling that her pater, her master, would not instantly know.

Red silk against her cheek, and a strongly beating heart below it, covered in muscles whose power Sarah could feel as he shifted her weight slightly in his arms.
I am the fire, and I must be tamed.

“Look at the fire, columba,” Robert said, and Sarah obeyed automatically, turning her eyes from the darker red of his robe to the bright oranges and crimsons of the leaping tongues of flame. “Have you considered it?”

“Yes, pater,” Sarah said.

“Tell me, then,” he asked in a softer voice. “What are you?”

Sarah looked at the fire, and although her mind said,
I am the fire,
the knowledge of what she must say, what Claudia had told her to say without letting Sarah know that she gave the instruction, came automatically to her lips. “I am a columba. A dove.”

“And what is your purpose?” Something in Robert’s voice sounded satisfied, even pleased, and again Sarah felt the forbidden part of her soul respond with a warm happiness to hear that she had shown herself a good girl.

“To give you pleasure, pater,” she said.

Robert didn’t speak again for a long while. He turned and began to walk to the side of the hall, carrying Sarah as if she were as light as a feather. She turned from the fire and looked up, desperate to know where his eyes had gone, because that must be where he carried her. His blue gaze directed itself straight ahead of them, but when Sarah turned to look, all she could see there were blank stone faces between the pillars that gave the illusion of supporting the vault of the ceiling. Each pillar had its torch but, like the fire, those torches seemed to emit no smoke.