Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 61287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 306(@200wpm)___ 245(@250wpm)___ 204(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 61287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 306(@200wpm)___ 245(@250wpm)___ 204(@300wpm)
His smile changed again, his eyes crinkling in a way that seemed to make me a true confidante. More of that warmth spread in my upper body, like the glow of spiced honey, sweet and hot.
“As an educational experience,” he said. He nodded.
My lips parted without a sound, because that phrase educational experience had made it all so very clear.
A master was a teacher, as well as a figure of ultimate authority, after all. Master G had sometimes reminded us of that at the Institute. What I needed above all, I had learned here in Master Hendryk’s house, was a firm-handed teacher, to deliver individual lessons, educational experiences designed for a girl like me, who craved the deepest possible degradation.
I didn’t know how I could feel so sure of my instinctive analysis of Candy’s problem, but I couldn’t shake the impression that the artificial girl needed to feel something very specific. Call it feminine intuition—real-girl feminine intuition, maybe—but I felt absolutely certain that Candy needed to have her jealousy validated and addressed.
She would find herself in a lower place than mine—I couldn’t help a surge of pride and happiness at the thought. But she would have a place, and she and I would be whatever kind of friends a real submissive and an artificial one could be.
I stood there in a strange reverie, in what seemed a frozen scene… a tableau: an owned, submissive, naked bed girl… next to another owned, submissive, naked girl, an oddly motionless but utterly real young woman made to bend over a whipping chair… next to my tall, muscular, golden-haired master—my person? asked my brain suddenly.
The idea provoked a wave of heat to my cheeks, because how could a man who liked to whip girls… who got so very hard when he whipped a girl… how could he be anyone’s person that way? At the same time, I felt a hard clench between my thighs, because how could a girl like me have any other kind of person? After what I had learned, what he had taught me, how could Master Hendryk not be my person?
He broke the silence that had suddenly fallen on the lewd scene with words that at first made as little sense as Candy’s string of numbers and letters.
“Assessment,” he said, casting his eyes for some reason into the upper corner of the room, “you there?”
I got it then, and I understood quickly, realizing at the same time in what seemed like a different, higher part of my mind that I had learned to understand it: the Institute, we concubines in training knew, had watchers called assessors. We had theorized that they watched us from tiny cameras with tiny microphones, though we had never known for sure—and we had decided that they must also watch in the homes that our owners would take us to.
A woman’s voice confirmed that I had figured it out, and I couldn’t keep a little smile from my face at the surge of pride in my chest. I had understood it, and I had watched myself understanding it.
What a strange part of becoming an owned sexual servant, observed that same higher part of my brain. I supposed I had had it in my head for a long time—always, maybe—but I didn’t think I had ever become conscious of it this way.
That whole train of thought passed in a moment, during the very first word spoken by the woman who must serve as an assessor for whatever part of the Institute monitored concubines after they had gone to their masters’ houses. The voice seemed to come from everywhere, in crystal clear tones that could only mean that someone—my billionaire owner, obviously—had spent a fortune on the sound system.
“Alexandra Portinassi here, Mr. Vanderbruggen,” said the assured, hyper-competent sounding voice.
“Did you register the anomaly?” he asked, glancing over at me with a fleeting half-smile flashing across his lips that sent a ray of irrepressible happiness shining from my heart out into the rest of my body. That little smile seemed to say that I had become a partner in this urgent project of helping Candy—and perhaps even in foiling some nefarious activity by a competitor of Selecta.
“We have it, thanks to the audio of it we just recorded. It didn’t register where it should have in Candy’s system, but as of…”
The assessor paused, as if she had turned her attention to some source of information.
“…twenty-seven seconds ago we’ve identified the blocked-off sector, and we think we know who put it there. More to come on that, obviously, but feel free to wake Candy up, and we recommend following Renee’s suggestion.”
Another little surge of pride filled my chest. The smile on Master Hendryk’s face broadened and stayed there, and he kept his eyes locked on mine.
“I thought you might,” he said. “I’m guessing that whatever the hacker did has ended up spurring some kind of progress in Candy’s AI?”