Legacy

Evangeline sent a car to pick her up on Friday. Dakota agreed to come without really knowing where she was going; she only knew that Evangeline was staying in a city about an hour's ride from her much smaller, rural town. The first sign that she might be getting in over her head came when the car first arrived. The car bore a logo she'd never seen before—a letter B with wings—and she had to look it up online.

Bentley. The car was a Bentley.

Where she came from, her parents' Mercedes was considered ostentatious almost to the point of bad taste. At least the Bentley's back seat was comfortable. She sat back against the warm leather and fished around in her backpack for the book she'd borrowed. Finding the time to read was often a challenge for her, but an hour of enforced stillness in the back seat of a car would provide her with ample opportunity. Even so, she found it difficult to concentrate on the actual text.

Instead, each image from the page caused her mind to wander. The idea of steel bracelets on her wrists, ready to be locked together at a moment's notice. The concept that a woman was meant to be open and available at all times, in an almost spiritual sense as well as the simply physical, left her experimenting with different kinds of being open—or simply with different kinds of being. She let her legs part as she sat, exposing the smooth and graceful sinew, not to mention the soft and sensitive skin of her inner thighs. She parted her lips and let them pout, careful still to breathe through her nose so that her soft lips wouldn't chap. And she thought about what it meant to be open. To accept. To savor and experience rather than to give and do.

Dakota was startled to discover that, the more she considered it, the more natural it seemed. Her entire life had been an exercise in acceptance, had it not? From the very moment her mother had been killed. How different might her life have been if only Sara St John had survived that crash?

The car gave a muted jolt as it left the highway via an unfamiliar exit. Suddenly alert, Dakota took in her surroundings only to realize she wasn't at all familiar with this part of the city. In fact, they were hardly still in the city at all. They had seemingly passed directly through it.

"Hey, where are you taking me?" she asked, trying to keep that sense of alarm out of her voice.

The driver glanced at her in the rearview mirror. Then he tapped the navigation display on the dash. "We'll be there soon," he said, as if that were meant to reassure her. "I'm not lost."

Perhaps the driver wasn't lost, but they appeared to be on the northwest side of the city—a place where Dakota had never been and, as far as she knew, where she had no reason to be. After all, there was nothing at all there. Wasn't there? The car turned right off the road and down a long, unmarked road. The asphalt was smooth and well-maintained, and yet it was marked here and there with the barred grates of cattle guards, which seemed to confirm Dakota's suspicion that there was indeed nothing here. But that was before she saw the house built against the desert hillside.

But house was the wrong word. This was a mansion. A castle. A compound. Whoever owned this place made her immodestly successful parents look like house-poor pretenders to the upper middle class. Either that or they were currently in bankruptcy proceedings. Dakota was just reaching for the door handle when the driver opened her door, bowing subtly at the waist and asking her, "May I take your bag?"

"No, it's fine—I got it," she said. It would have been too embarrassing to permit him to carry it for her.

"We're here," he said, apparently to no one. It was only then that Dakota noticed the earpiece he wore. "Ok. Meet you at the door."

Another man met them at the door, and the driver smiled at her and left her in the care of this second man before returning to the car and going wherever drivers go when they're done driving. Dakota swallowed, once more wondering what she'd gotten herself into as the second man—she decided she would call him the butler—showed her inside.

Dakota had never seen so much glass and marble. The setting sun was already beyond the hill to the west, and the gilded purple of night shone through windows that would look upon the first rays of the rising sun in the morning. The butler was saying something, but she wasn't listening; she was gaping at everything. Statues done in bronze stood before the columns that supported the high vaulted ceiling above the sunken floor of the den. Genuine oil paintings—they looked genuine to her, at least—hung on well-shaded portions of the interior walls. There was no television, but a vast fireplace occupied the south wall. Mostly, however, she was staring at those statues.

They were female. And nude. And kneeling. And one was groveling beneath the boot of her master. And the other was placidly awaiting the lash. The sight of them, with swollen nipples and engorged labia, each of them posed in a state of utter submission, held Dakota transfixed on the marble floor, just a few steps beyond the entryway.

"Miss Rossi?" said the butler. "May I show you your room?"

"My room?" Dakota mumbled. But she followed him up the stairs, coming to the third floor suite which, as he explained, had been set aside for her.

"There's an attached bath," he was saying as she blinked at the king-sized bed.

"I probably won't stay," she said, although he wasn't listening. She hadn't known she was being invited for the weekend. She thought it would be dinner and a talk and...

"Dinner is already being prepared," said the butler. "If you require anything, don't hesitate to call."

"What's your number?" she asked.

The man smiled. "Via the intercom, Miss Rossi," he clarified, pointing out the device beside her bed. "Or simply shout James and I'm sure I'll hear."

Dakota might have blushed, but she was already so embarrassed that it couldn't have made any difference. She swallowed and gave a nod. "Yes, sir."

"That won't be necessary, Miss Rossi. The dining room is downstairs, on the right from the front door. Miss Morgan will be waiting."

With that, he was gone. Dakota was saying how he didn't have to call her Rossi, but it was too late and she was mumbling those words at no one. She collapsed onto the bed and wallowed at the center of the enormous mattress, lost in its softness. Was she really expected to stay? She hadn't even brought a change of clothes. Actually, she hadn't even brought any clothes that were fit to be worn in a place like this: the car had picked her up from school, right after athletics. And was this Evangeline's house? She must have been a billionaire.

Maybe she was. Maybe that was how Evangeline Morgan could afford to provide an allowance to any woman dumb enough or determined enough to get through her little leadership course. For now, however, Dakota tried to set those questions aside. There would be time to ask about the program after she had learned all that Evangeline could tell her about Sara St John—about her apparently cheating whore of a mother.