Breaking Abigail (5 page)

Sir nodded. “Yes,” he said, a little hoarsely. “Yes, you do.”

* * *

Abigail stepped off the jet way in the San Francisco airport and looked around. So strange and exciting—she would soon be doing real work at a company that Abigail, along with everyone else with the slightest knowledge of what was going on these days, knew would change the world. They had recruited her in March and paid for her ticket. Their driver met her at the luggage claim and helped her into the luxurious car.

He closed the windows and the glass between him and Abigail, saying it was so that she didn’t have to be annoyed by his radio, and turned on the air conditioning. Abigail noticed just the faintest whiff of an unfamiliar odor…

…and awoke in an unfamiliar bed, in a windowless room that was nevertheless furnished nicely enough, with beige wall-to-wall carpet and a bureau with a mirror above it. Really, it was very much like a nice hotel room: there were also a couch, two chairs, and a coffee table. Somehow she noticed the furnishings despite the panic that ripped through her, as she tried to figure out what had happened.

The room had three doors, and there was a knock at one of them—Abigail couldn’t figure out which, she was so disoriented, and then she realized that it didn’t matter at all, for one of the doors—the one farthest from her, opened, and a man came into the room.

“Hello, Abigail,” he said. “I’m Master Ian. I’d like you to get out of bed and come kneel in front of me, please.”

“What?” Abigail looked down at her body, as if checking that it had arrived in the room along with her mind, as she realized that this gorgeous hazel-eyed man with long blond hair in a ponytail, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, seemed to be giving her a command that concerned it. Her body seemed all to be there, dressed in a blue short-sleeved top and the cute plaid shorts she had picked out for her arrival in the Bay area.

“I know you’re feeling disoriented, Abigail, but it’s very important that we get off to a good start, you and I. Please come kneel in front of me, or you’ll begin to find out what happens to disobedient girls here.”

Abigail found that she couldn’t even really process the words he… this… this Master Ian person had said. Some part of her understood, but that part didn’t control her body at all, and so all she did was shake her head, her eyes wide.

Master Ian nodded, with a little frustrated snort through his nose, and closed the door behind him. He took four strides and he was right next to Abigail, and he was putting his huge hand with its fine blond hair out and behind her head. He seized her hair, and it was like a thing that Abigail couldn’t quite remember, but then it wasn’t, because Master Ian had begun to drag Abigail out of bed that way.

“Ow! Stop… oh, God… please… I’ll… I’ll do it.”

“Yes,” Master Ian said, “you will, Abigail, after I spank you.”

He had dragged her, as she clambered desperately to get her feet under her and onto the carpet, out of bed. Now he put his huge left arm around her waist and, using his right hand in her hair and the arm around her waist, he thrust her down over the side of the bed. He took his right hand out of her hair and instantly started to spank her with it, very hard.

“Ow! Oh… please…”

“Call me ‘master,’” he said.

“Please, master!” The blows hurt more than Abigail could ever have imagined a spanking through shorts and underwear could. “Please… ow!” She felt her face crumple, and the tears began to flow.

Master Ian stopped spanking her. “Are you going to obey me, Abigail?” he asked, quietly but with the authority clear in his tone.

“Yes, master,” she said.

“Alright, let’s see,” he said, and took his left hand off her waist.

For the first time since Master Ian had come through the door, and it had begun to become apparent that Abigail had been kidnapped, she had the opportunity to consider, for a brief moment, what was taking place. If she were being held for ransom, why the spanking, and why the command to kneel, and why did he call himself ‘master’? But what else could it be, unless… but her mind stopped itself from heading in the direction that a voice from her body, from the region where he had just spanked her, wanted to take it.

Those thoughts ran through her mind in a few seconds, just as her body moved to comply with the orders of the man who looked like an off-duty fireman, strong and tall with his arms folded as he waited for her obedience. As Abigail rose from the side of the bed, she instinctively put her hands in front of her, clasped in an attitude of prayer. She found she couldn’t look at Master Ian for more than a few seconds, and, as she advanced toward him with tiny, timid steps, she realized that the reason was how he had affected her… her private part. She felt her cotton panties becoming damper and damper even as she knelt on the rug, realizing with a tremendous blush that her face was mere inches away from the fly of his jeans.

“Look at me, Abigail,” he said, and she looked up into his face.

“I’m now going to tell you why you’re here. I’m afraid it’s going to shock you, but hopefully over the next two days, which you and I are going to spend together here, you will begin to come to terms with your new life.”

Abigail felt her eyes grow wide. Master Ian put out his hand and stroked her cheek gently with the backs of his fingers.

“You belong to a wealthy man now, Abigail. You have been brought here to learn how to serve him as a concubine. I am your first master, but I will not be your last. After I have broken you and taught you to obey me, I will take you to the Institute, where your training will reach completion, with the participation of your owner. Most important, it will be he who deflowers you, since you have come here with your maidenhead intact. Even without taking that maidenhead, however, there are many things I can do to get you ready to give your virginity to the man who owns you.”

Abigail’s mouth hung open, and her breath came in little gasps.

“You don’t need to tell me, Abigail, how you’re feeling right now. I already know how wet you are.”

“What? No… you… you have to let me… my father will ransom me. He’ll pay anything.”

“We already have all the money we need, Abigail. We got it from your owner. Having a beautiful young concubine like you to serve him in his bed is worth a great deal of money to him.”

“Why… why me?” Abigail couldn’t seem to string two thoughts together in logical sequence. She wanted desperately to deny the way Master Ian’s words were affecting her body, but she wanted even more desperately to get some idea of what was going on here—why she, Abigail Podret, had ended up in this room, with this man saying these outlandish things to her.

“We know all about you, Abigail,” Master Ian replied. “We know what you fantasize about when you play with yourself, and how much you yearn for a firm hand like mine on your backside, correcting you and guiding you to give pleasure. When we told your new owner about you, he was quite willing to pay what we asked to take you and to train you.”

“No… no… you’re… you’re lying. How…?”

“That’s not really important, Abigail. But I don’t think you should call me a liar, and I think you know that I’ve asked you to call me ‘master.’ Why don’t you stand up and get undressed for me now, so I can give you your first proper spanking?”

“Undressed?” Abigail’s mind just wouldn’t seem to work at its customary level. She literally didn’t understand, for a long moment, what Master Ian meant when he said “get undressed.”

Chapter Six

Mark’s fists tightened into two small packages of tense envy as he watched the scene on the closed-circuit camera feed in his own room. Mark’s room lay at the other end of the hall from where Abigail had just met Ian MacLeish, the first of the five trainers Anne-Marie and Jean had hired.

Mark had asked Anne-Marie whether she thought he should be involved in hiring the staff for the Institute, but she had demurred, saying, “It would probably not be best,” and leaving it at that. If all took place according to plan, he would be involved in future hiring, he knew. To hire the men who would have nearly total rights over Abigail’s body, however, would have been an invitation to dissent, just as much as if he had tried to involve himself in the process of awarding her contract to her new owner.

Mark had not even asked Anne-Marie whether he should involve himself in that phase of the project. The name they had finally given him, Hans Goterborg, meant nothing to him, but he had looked it up and had found, not at all to his surprise, an immensely wealthy Scandinavian who wintered in the Italian Riviera and the Swiss Alps. The pang he had felt at seeing what Abigail’s life would be like as Goterborg’s concubine had twisted his heart nearly as greatly as watching her with Ian did now.

At the same time, of course, Mark’s cock was as hard as a bar of steel. Jean’s new colleague in what they were calling the assessment department, Brian Carter, had told him the day before not to try to deny the arousal he would feel, and Mark had a two-hour session with Brian to prepare him to watch Ian break Abigail.

“Someday,” Brian said, “the Institute will have so much data that there will be very little guesswork involved in my job at all. I don’t mind saying that while the thrill of making predictions about what Abigail will do based on my gut and my more conventional training is fun, I can’t wait until we have a bunch of girls’ data, and can run real statistical models.”

“So you’re saying you’re only guessing?” Mark said, incredulous. “I thought Jean said that he was certain this was the right therapy for her.” He wondered if he should simply pull the plug right then.

“Oh, we’re not uncertain about that, at all,” Brian said. Mark relaxed. “It’s just that we want to be as efficient and as beneficial to Abigail and to her owner as we can be. It would be helpful to know, for example, what the percentage chance is that she’ll, I don’t know, try to stop up the plumbing in hopes of creating an opportunity for escape. Or, for that matter, what the chance is that she’ll attempt escape at all. There’s not the slightest doubt, though, that Ian can get her submissive fantasies to the fore: the situation is just too ideal. Abigail’s psyche
wants
to submit. We’ve set up this program so that she can finally give into it: to survive, she only has to do the thing she wants to do most in the world. And she doesn’t even have to admit that she wants to do it.”

“So why would she try to escape, then?” Mark asked.

“Resistance is actually part of the fantasy,” Brian replied. “To try to escape, and to be brought back and punished, makes the submission work even better on the subconscious level and increases the therapeutic benefit. Even if we didn’t know that from experience with years of submissives in therapy in New York—though of course very few who are as repressed as Abigail is—we would have it in black and white in Abigail’s own words when we negotiated her boundaries in New York.”

Mark had read the complete transcript of the three days of profiling that had preceded the hypnotic session. He tried to remember the part Brian was talking about; it didn’t seem quite as clear to him as it apparently seemed to Brian. It went something like, “I… well… yeah, if they… you know… if they caught her when I was, I mean… she was, you know… trying to get away, they would do that same kind of thing.” Most of the transcript was like that, with ellipses every few words as Abigail had struggled to say things that her modesty didn’t want to let her say. Jean and Brian had come up with a script for the interviews that made absolutely no apparent reference to anything erotic and yet—even Mark could see—would discover Abigail’s fantasies and her boundaries.

There would also be a sort of ongoing negotiation, especially with her owner, when training began, not through the usual means of talking directly about hard limits but through the continuing analysis of what was happening in Abigail’s training. The interviews, and the data Jean and Brian’s junior colleagues, now called the assessors, generated from them, would serve as a guide to that negotiation. Hans Goterborg had pledged himself (and Mark would be able to verify that Goterborg was following what he had pledged through the 24/7 monitoring system they had put in place) to following the recommendations of the assessors, or have Abigail removed immediately without a refund of Goterborg’s money—the million for Abigail and the two million for the Institute.

The interviews had begun, “How would you define the word ‘submit’ in your own words?” and had never risen above that level of explicitness. The question that had elicited Abigail’s answer about “trying to get away” was “What kind of story could you tell about yourself and a man?” The answer, with minor prompting from Brian, had gone on for an hour, and had included the bit about “trying to get away” something like halfway through.

Reading the entirety of that answer, which had served as the culmination of all the interviews, Mark had gotten so hard he could scarcely believe it, given that neither Brian nor Abigail ever said anything that referred overtly to sex at all. In his prompting, Brian said things like “And what do you do?” and “And how does that make you feel, in the story?” In her answer, Abigail said things like, “Well, he… you know… he
has
me—the girl, her—then, and, um, he tells her… that he… you know, that he likes it, and he wants her to… I mean, he wants to have her… very often. And, um, in lots of different ways… like, you know, different places on her… on…”

Frankly, Mark had been surprised that Brian had even got her to the point where she referred obliquely to such things. But the interview scripts, Jean told him, had been designed to progress her that way. Mark asked again at that point why simple talk therapy couldn’t have produced good results, if it were possible to progress Abigail that way.

“Even if we spent hundreds of hours progressing her like this, Mark,” Jean had replied gently, “she still almost certainly could not actually
live
any of it. A conventional therapist, who viewed BDSM as a paraphilia, might declare Abigail cured at that point. We do not agree with that way of looking at it, and we hope you do not agree with it either.” Mark could only nod.