Legacy

Dakota was no longer a janitor. She didn't know what she was anymore, exactly. Not a slave. Definitely not. Her uniform had changed—she wore mostly her ordinary clothing, not a black polo and slacks—but her duties were surprisingly similar, except that she was no longer on the night shift. She still mopped and cleaned things. Still picked up after guests. But her primary duty now was to smile and be alluring when they looked at her, to exercise, rest well, and be ready in case she was called upon. And she was called upon with surprising regularity, usually the evening after she caught someone watching her in the gym or out on the running trail, or relaxing in the sauna. Especially that last one, and especially when she didn't bother with a towel.

That made it sound fun, didn't it. And perhaps it should have been. The July sun was hot overhead, and the Colorado countryside in bloom was beautiful to behold. Had she just been out hiking every day, on vacation, photographing birds and laying on picnic blankets and reading books while listening to birdsong and the wind in the trees, it would have been a very different time. She actually did get lots of reading done—the lodge had a wide variety of rather eye-opening books on hand—but it wasn't out in nature. It was usually lying right there next to the fireplace, which still crackled in the early mornings and again in the evenings when the mountain air remained chill. What amazed her most, however, was that very often in the midst of a scene with one of her clients, she wished that she could go back to reading. And not because the pain was unbearable or anything. The thing was, there was rarely any pain at all.

There was rarely anything but plain old sex.

She couldn't believe she was admitting this to herself, but there was no getting around it: sex was boring. She never could have imagined that when she was still in high school. For one thing, she never had any. Not once. She might have been a varsity cheerleader for four years, but she had never managed to be a slut. It just didn't work for her.

Mostly that was because the head basketball coach was out of her mind. It was the entire girls' athletics department, really. They had this idea that a female athlete should be, in effect, a modern-day Artemis: supremely skilled, breathtakingly fit, blue-ballingly virginal. Dakota had fit the bill perfectly. She'd been punished exactly once in four years for modifying the top of her cheerleading uniform to show off more of her midriff—her abs looked amazing that fall—and, after running lines long enough to vomit not once but three times, she'd learned her lesson. Even the appearance of impropriety was to be avoided at all costs: a lesson she learned so well that she never had a date in four years except at junior prom. And, no, her date hadn't gotten lucky.

If anyone was going to find a little furtive thrusting to be fascinating, it really should have been her, and yet she wasn't interested at all. Maybe—not to be too dramatic about it—she'd simply seen too much? Or maybe she had always been cursed. Maybe she was never meant to enjoy sex the old fashioned way. Her mother was apparently a wand thrall. Maybe, contrary to all appearances, an interest in the extreme ran in her blood.

The worst was the cuddling. One evening, still bound with silk scarves, she lay beneath a man who was genuinely handsome, apparently intelligent, and an incredibly considerate lover. He wrapped an arm around her and lay his head on her chest, kissing her sweat-salted skin and nibbling teasingly at one of her still-hard nipples, and then he breathed a soft sigh and there he remained.

"I don't think you have any idea how beautiful you are," he whispered. "And I know you hear that from everyone. But still, you really don't. You can't hear it, can you."

She kept her breathing steady so that he couldn't detect the mental sigh that line brought out of her.

"Beauty isn't big tits and a nice ass—which you have, by the way," he said, thinking out loud to her. Men sometimes did that after sex. Lowered inhibitions left them without the filters that usually stopped them sounding stupid. "It's more than that. There's something elegant to you. You're classical. Like a Greek goddess."

"Like Artemis?" she said. She made her voice breathy in a way that made his cock twitch against her thigh, because she could.

"Yeah. God, I wish I had time to go again."

"Maybe next time."

Women were a little better sometimes. They lacked the same off switch—that same tendency to become handsome, well-spoken teddy bears after a single orgasm. Some of them actually became angry afterward instead. It was strange to see. Of course, others—far too many others, for Dakota's taste—would resort to the use of a strap-on in order to simulate the kind of physical and emotional connection the men could enjoy naturally. It didn't work. What was either furtive and abortive or repetitive and performative with the men became repetitive and pointless with the women, and she hated it all the more. Eventually, the only woman she looked forward to spending time with was Jolley. Jolley, at least, made a brave effort at keeping her sane.

On their third night together, Jolley took her to a place she had never been before. Not physically—by then, Dakota had seen every secret room and every hidden chamber the lodge had to offer. It was a mental place. Maybe a spiritual one. Was it subspace?

Jolley stood her on a wooden horse and chained weights to her ankles. The hard, triangular ridge atop the wooden horse bit into her without mercy, without cease, and soon she was fighting with every ounce of her strength to lift herself by her own shackled wrists, even though her arms were chained behind her. The agony was inevitable and inescapable, and in spite of her best intentions her safeword was suddenly right there on the tip of her tongue.

Dakota didn't want it. She wanted to spit it out, forget it, never have one again. In the end, though, she didn't even have to say it. Jolley saw the tears in her eyes after—how long had it been? Fifteen? Twenty minutes? Jolley saw those tears and heard her groans of ever-mounting pain and released her, and Dakota could have strangled her. Those sessions with Jolley taught her two things: it wasn't really possible to get just enough pain and abuse to remain sane; and there was something missing in a woman's touch. By the end of the third week, Dakota knew exactly what it was.

It was real power. Real danger. A woman could be dangerous by accident, or by negligence. A man was danger. He was danger embodied. He was danger personified. His very being was steeped in it. He was bigger, stronger, harder, faster, smarter—a good man was everything she was, but only more of it in every dimension. Most of the men here, admittedly, weren't that good. Most men everywhere probably weren't. But the good ones were. Like the one she caught staring at her one morning while she was re-reading Story of O.

All right, she wasn't reading. She was lying in a tangle of blankets by the fireplace, and she was panting and stroking her clit while daydreaming of being bound in chains, her skin laid open again and again by a man's whip. Her climaxes had always been quiet at home. Here—maybe there was a performative element, or maybe she had simply become hungrier, more willing to take what she desired—she had found it impossible not to cry out, and when she finished she saw he was staring. She didn't know for how long.

And also, she'd seen him before.

He'd been at the party—used the submissive who'd been placed in Dakota's care. And he'd been at the seance, too, hadn't he? She knew she'd seen his eyes before. They were too familiar. She stared back at those eyes while he watched her, and she sucked her fingers clean.

Later, she asked Jolley who he was.

"Preston Wittaker," Jolley answered. "Yeah, he's tall and blonde and built and handsome, but you better stay away from him."

"Why?"

"He's a real sadist. No fucking around. He's a member of the Court of Thorns, and they're bad news. You remember Sarah, right?"

"Right."

Yes, she remembered.

"Funny. You know his eyes are the exact same color as yours?"