For… forme.
I swallowed hard. I had just come into terrible danger of emitting a little sob to match Viola’s humiliating noise. The only thing that saved me was the knowledge that the vast majority of the audience must have their eyes fixed not on my arousal but on Viola’s, and I felt absolutely certain that that number had just gone up to what must seem to those watching a shockingly high level.
“She wants to escape, my friends,” the prince said, as he held Viola at shoulder and hip, his hands dominant in their control but not quite lascivious in their positioning. Paradoxically—it seemed to me—my detachment from myself sent me into Viola’s perspective, and I felt the agony she must be experiencing, of wanting that royal, handsome (not as handsome as Philip, but still very attractive) man’s hands to go further, to take more liberties. “But it’s herself she’s trying to get away from. As she watches her friend Sara whipped and fucked she’ll show you, her people, exactly how much she needs the very same sort of treatment.”
I managed to keep my gasp from becoming audible, by opening my mouth wide enough that I could draw the air my lungs suddenly needed without it making a noise as it rushed inward past my lips. But in the process, I had just shown the audience, I knew, my open mouth and the widening of my eyes, at the casual way His Royal Highness had just announced my lewd, degrading fate—because of course the director had gone for a close-up the moment after the prince had saidwhipped and fucked. I would have done the same thing, in the director’s chair.
It didn’t take that much effort, however, to replace that weak, offended expression with a scornful glance over at the prince. The idea had occurred to me that this whole spectacle—my whole ordeal—actually had much less to do with me than it had to do with Viola. Anger filled my chest. My boss, the woman to whom I had given such complete loyalty, had upended—no, really, destroyed—my life this way, as a sort of pawn move in a game with the prince that she must have known she would lose utterly. My whipping and fucking, my training for my master’s pleasure, all amounted to a gambit in that game.
Well, fuck her. I turned back toward the camera, though I desperately wanted to look at Philip. His words about buying me, as ridiculous a declaration of amorous feeling as I could ever have imagined, nonetheless seemed to reassure me. The way he had held me, the warmth of him, his maddening little smile… they all told a different story from the prince’s and Viola’s little psychosexual drama. Maybe from some grand galactic standpoint the sexual bondage of Sara Granzofar wouldn’t even merit a footnote in the history of the Magisterian Federation’s subjugation of the rogue world of Artemisia, but I—the actual Sara—would have Philip.
Well… he’ll have me. He’llhaveme.
The thrill of need at that thought, and the fierce tingle as the governor controlled it, were more intense than any I had experienced during the past few minutes. I kept my face set into the same glare, but my heart quailed as I realized how high the number on the screen must have gone.
The prince had started to draw Viola toward the throne-like chair.
“Come with me, Viola,” he said, as if chiding a recalcitrant child. “We’ll watch together.”
I watched the camera follow their movements as Prince Hendren sat down. For a moment I saw in Viola’s eyes, as if it had come into my own head, the thought that His Royal Highness would pull her over his knee and flip up her schoolgirl skirt, then pull down her panties to bestow another sound spanking. I saw just how ambiguously her body and mind reacted to the idea.
Instead the prince pulled Viola onto his lap, one hand around her waist and the other casually on her knees. I had to part my lips again to keep from another little gasp. The position seemed so atavistic, like an image from ancient Earth of romantic—marital, even—comfort: traditional and even patriarchal at a level almost hard-wired into the human psyche, or mine anyway. The way things should be, based on the biology of human sexual dimorphism that made men big and women little.
“Go ahead, Major Harrow,” said the prince. “Let’s see you train Sara here to serve you properly.”
CHAPTER28
Philip
I took a deep breath.
“Two, close-up on him,” George said from the control panel.
I spoke to Sara, making my tone even and steady: the voice of justice.
“Go ahead and get on the punishment horse, girl.”
For a moment, she hesitated. I watched the tension in her shoulders grow as she tried to control her body’s reaction. I thought I saw her head jerk very slightly to the right, as if she had had the impulse to look at me over her shoulder, but had resisted it. I couldn’t see her face, and suddenly I very much wanted to—both because Sara’s face was rapidly becoming my favorite sight in the world and because I would have had the chance to read those expressive features and to gauge the ongoing process of her training.
Her training as my own concubine. The very sight of the shifting muscles in her bare shoulders and the way her blonde hair, caught by the purple ribbon into a loose ponytail, fell down her back, affirmed the decision I had made a few minutes earlier, to buy her contract at any cost.
As Magisterians went—where royals and nobles stood at the top of the scale—a major in the military police didn’t possess fabulous wealth. Like all native Magisterians, though, I had a share of the gravitium mines. After this broadcast it would likely set me back a pretty penny, but Sara Granzofar of Artemisia seemed to me the precise reason I had saved the vast majority of my wages and earnings on my gravitium share.
I had started her training, I realized at that moment, with the intention that it would ready her formybed, rather than any other master’s: having fully realized the strength of my desire for her, here at the crucial moment, I wanted to make absolutely sure I trained my girl properly.
The number on the governor’s controller would have told me something, but Sara’s face could tell me much more. I had neither, at this crucial moment, since the controller sat in my pocket and Sara had controlled any impulse to look over her shoulder at me. I had to go on my dominant instinct, which suited me fine. The mere clenching of her little fists at her nearly bare flanks, set off so enticingly by the lacy waistband of the thong panties whose rear claimed her bottom so charmingly, made my blood sing and my cock stiffen.
I knew how aroused she must be: as needy between her thighs as the governor would allow with its current setting of four. The precise numeric value the device attributed to the need caused by my command to mount the punishment horse would have helped me a little, I supposed, but it certainly wouldn’t have changed how I treated this moment.
“Sara,” I said.
She shuddered. Again I saw the little jerk of her head, and I felt quite sure this time that she had suppressed a yearning—a yearning my own heart echoed—to see me, to read my expression just as I wanted to read hers.
From my left, where the prince sat with Viola on his lap, I heard a little murmur of a sob.
“Three,” George told the third cameraman, “On Viola’s face. Close-up. Philip, look over there, if you want.”
I knew what he wanted, and I did it a little more slowly than I would have if I hadn’t known the galaxy was watching: I turned my head to see Viola’s red-faced reaction to watching Sara caught in the impossible dilemma between obedience and defiance.