My lips parted as I heard this. For the first time, I felt real pity for Viola.
“Now,” the prince continued after a moment’s pause, as if to let his words sink in, “would you like to go fetch a towel and soap, and some carpet cleaner and a basin, or would you like me to take down your panties and spank you right here?”
Viola hung her head like a little girl, reprimanded by a teacher. Part of me wanted to intercede for her, though I knew it would do nothing but get me in trouble with my guardian. Another part of me, despite the flash of compassion that had gripped me a moment before, wanted to see Viola made to undergo the kind of degradation that at least approached the kind she had meted out to me, to save herself.
Worst of all, though, I felt a helpless surge of arousal at the thought of the president turned over the Magisterian prince’s knee with her panties down, his strong hand falling over and over again on her bare bottom. I saw the card flash, and I saw Viola’s eyes go to it.
She let out a little sobbing gasp, turning to me with a wounded expression that struck me to the heart.
“Answer me, girl,” the prince said, his voice turning severe.
“I’ll go!” Viola said, her tone just as petulant as the little girl’s she had just resembled. She turned away and started to walk—run, practically—toward the bathroom. The prince caught up with her immediately though, and put his arm around her waist, the gesture so arrogant and possessive that it made me gasp. I saw Viola give a little shudder, and then allow herself to be led by the Magisterian.
My attention was diverted then by the feeling of Major Harrow’s hands on me as he began to release the restraints, first the ones around my knees and then the cuffs and the belt.
“Don’t move,” he cautioned, as I looked up at him tentatively. “I want to you learn to keep your position this way without the straps to hold you down.”
I felt my face twist into an expression of pitiful pleading. I wanted to cover myself so badly, to get off the chair and hide in the corner, that I would have begged my guardian, all defiance gone, if I had the slightest hope that it might sway him. The major looked down at me, his eyes evaluating me once again, the little smile on his lips.
“Good girl,” he said.
Those words seemed to me the most humiliating thing and yet the most welcome thing he could have said, but then he made both those feelings even stronger.
“I know this will be hard, but I know you can do it—and I knowyouknow how much you need it.”
CHAPTER18
Sara
Needthat? Need to have my pussy and bottom cleaned by the deposed president after I had just been made to pee on myself?
“But…” I started to say, feeling my hands clench into fists at my sides, as if to stop me from trying to use them to get up.
“Yes?” my guardian asked.
My lips parted as I looked up into his bearded face. My expression, the tale my eyes must have told of helpless inability to find anything to say, provoked a sudden change in him: the little smile on his lips became a big one—a much bigger one than I had yet seen. For the first time, I got a good look at Major Harrow’s dazzling white teeth, and I had to swallow hard to keep from gasping at the way my heart responded.
“Please,” I tried, in a whisper. “Please don’t… don’t make me.”
The astonishing ray of sunshine that seemed to emanate from his smile receded as his lips closed again, but their amused upward turn persisted.
“Sara, my dear,” he said, “let me say two things. First, I’m most certainly going to make you.”
He paused, and for a split second as my mind absorbed my guardian’s words I thought,Didn’t he just saytwothings.
Then I understood, because the effect of his calm, deep voice sayingI’m most certainly going to make youtook hold. I bit my lip and felt my brow furrow as my body’s helpless need showed itself again in a little jerk of my hips, a little squirm of my paddled bottom—and of course the flash of red in his hand and the tingle in my wanton pussy.
“Second,” he continued, “the more I make you, the better you’ll be able to enjoy your training and your term of service.”
I felt my face screw up into a pout of rejection. “Enjoy?” I demanded, finding a shred of defiance somewhere in the back of my mind, as my egalitarian upbringing responded to the man’s apparent conviction that he knew so much more about my welfare than I did. How could his arrogance and his self-assurance affect me in such absolutely contrary ways?
Behind him, from the direction of the bathroom, the prince now led Viola back toward the exam chair. She carried a basin in front of her, clearly full of water from the careful way she held it in front of her. For the first time I really noticed what they had made her wear: a plaid skirt of the kind that Artemisian schoolgirls still wore even after so many centuries and so far away from old Earth, and a white blouse.
I felt heat creep back into my face at the sight of the president in such demeaning clothing, and I wondered exactly why the prince had dressed her that way—certainly, I imagined, because of something they knew about Viola… something about her ‘complicated’ needs. As she made her way toward me, the clothing, which included flats and white knee socks to complete the effect, seemed to match the servile function the prince had forced on the deposed chief executive. My blush got hotter as I couldn’t help seeing Viola as a schoolgirl made to clean up after something shameful she had done in the schoolroom.
“Viola,” said Major Harrow, “you may come right over here and begin. I was just talking to Sara about enjoying her new life. It makes me wonder whether you’re having any, shall we say, pangs of envy, now that you see what her training will involve?”
“What?” I demanded, the word emerging purely as a reflex of disbelief.