Chapter 7
Paul
I met Anne Chamberlain a week after she had, apparently, gotten herself paddled and fucked with a strap-on by her boss, in her boss’s office.
Reading that in Anne’s assessment file, along with the accompanying biometric analysis, had piqued my interest, certainly.
Anne herself, though, would have captivated me anyway; I could tell from the moment I laid eyes on her in the NMB studio on the twenty-first floor of Selecta HQ.
She stood near the entrance to the farmhouse kitchen set, clutching a call sheet against her chest the way a schoolgirl might hold a textbook—pressed flat, both arms wrapped around it, as if the thin piece of paper could shield her from whatever was coming.
Her blonde hair was pulled back in a low ponytail that exposed the long line of her neck, and she wore a cream blouse buttoned to the collar and a navy skirt that fell just past her knees.
Conservative. Deliberate. The outfit of a girl who had spent considerable time that morning choosing her armor for the day.
I’d been standing by the lighting rig near the bedroom set, reviewing the shot list with Darlene Gray, our videographer, when she came in.
The studio door opened and Anne appeared in the threshold like a deer at the edge of a clearing—one step in, then a pause, her green eyes sweeping the space with the wide, cataloguing attention of someone taking in far more than she wanted to.
And there was plenty to take in. The studio occupied most of the twenty-first floor’s east wing, a cavernous space that had been subdivided into five distinct sets, four of them meticulous re-creations of rooms you might find in a modest farmhouse somewhere in one of Selecta’s New Modesty communities.
The fifth set didn’t have anything in it at the moment; it stood ready to represent the rare scene occurring outside the New Modesty home.
The kitchen had whitewashed cabinets, a butcher-block island, and copper pots hanging from a rack above the stove.
The living room had a worn leather sofa, a braided rug, and bookshelves filled with titles I knew Melissa had personally selected—homemaking manuals, devotional guides, the kind of domestic literature that would read as authentic in a wide shot.
The bathroom had white tile, a claw-foot tub, and a mirror positioned at an angle that Darlene had spent forty minutes calibrating for optimal reflection during shoots.
And the bedroom—the centerpiece, the set where most of the Surrender Line campaign would be photographed—featured a wrought-iron bed frame, white linen sheets, and curtains that moved in the breeze from a hidden fan, because nothing sold intimacy like the suggestion of an open window in a room where a girl was about to take her clothes off.
Anne’s gaze traveled from set to set, and I watched the color climb her neck.
Not a blush, exactly. More like a trace of color, the skin pinkening in patches along her throat and across her collarbones where the cream blouse didn’t quite conceal it.
Her lips parted. Her fingers tightened on the call sheet.
She was terrified. That much was obvious to anyone with eyes, and I had better eyes than most. Twelve years in the military, with five of them in psychological operations, plus eleven as an Institute trainer, had given me an education in reading bodies that no university could match.
I’d debriefed captured insurgents who’d shown less visible stress than Anne Chamberlain showed walking into a photography studio.
The tension lived in her shoulders, which were hiked a good inch and a half above their natural line.
It lived in her jaw, which she had clenched so tightly I could see the muscles bunching beneath the skin.
It lived in her hands, in the white-knuckled grip on that call sheet, and in her feet, which had stopped moving entirely, rooting her just inside the doorway as if her body had decided, independent of her conscious mind, that this was as far as it was willing to go.
But I knew something more from my Institute days as a dominant master of repressed girls just like Anne Chamberlain. Anne’s terror came much more from the dark, unknown depths inside her than from the novelty of the circumstances.
I excused myself from Marcus and crossed the studio floor toward her.
I took my time. Not because I wanted to intimidate Anne, but because the way a man approaches a frightened, repressed, submissive woman in the first thirty seconds of her training tells her everything she needs to know about the next thirty days. I wanted those seconds to count.
* * *
Anne
I swallowed hard as the enormous, gorgeous man who seemed at least partly in charge of things here came toward me.
He moved with a kind of unhurried grace that reminded me of a big predator: a tiger, maybe…
aware of himself in space, aware of the effect his size and weight had on the smaller creatures, like me, around it.
Each step looked measured. His polished, expensive shoes carried him toward me at a pace that gave me time to look at him, and looking at him was a problem.
He was significantly older than me. He seemed to be in his late forties, I guessed, maybe closer to fifty, though the years sat on him the way they sit on certain men, adding weight and authority rather than diminishing anything.
His hair was dark with threads of silver at the temples, cropped close in a way that suggested military service rather than fashion.
His jaw had a square, uncompromising line that I couldn’t help thinking indicated a man who made decisions and lived with them.
His eyes, though… they stopped my train of thought.
No, derailed it. Brown, deep-set, and possessed of an attention so focused it felt like the touch of someone who didn’t feel much need to be gentle.
He wore dark trousers and a fitted charcoal shirt, open at the collar, sleeves rolled to the forearms to expose his thick wrists and hands that looked like they could break things or build things with equal competence.
He was broad across the chest and shoulders, tapering to a trim waist, and he carried himself with the absolute stillness of a man who had nothing to prove to anyone in any room he entered.
I suddenly remembered the brief conversation I had had with Yolanda the previous night. She and I had drifted apart, I supposed, over my time at Selecta—mostly because I didn’t think I wanted to tell her about the embarrassing nature of my work for Penelope.
“Annie,” she had said, her voice breathless in the way that it always got when she wanted to dish the dirt, “what happened with your boss? No one seems to know the real story!”
“Oh,” I had said, my face burning as I paced my tiny apartment, “don’t believe everything you hear.”
But if I didn’t want to admit how humiliating and, well, intimate my job had gotten, the thought of telling Yolanda about the effect the man walking in my direction had on me… that seemed even worse, though I couldn’t have said why.
My heart had started to race. I could feel it in my throat, in my wrists, in a place behind my sternum that felt like I had a small bird trapped there.
“Anne,” he said when he reached me, and the sound of my name in his voice—deep, resonant, with a warmth that seemed at odds with the sheer physical authority he projected—made something flutter low in my stomach. “I’m Paul Mason. I’ll be working with you on the campaign.”
He extended his hand. I had to peel one arm away from the call sheet to take it, and when his fingers closed around mine—warm, dry, engulfing—I felt the size difference between us.
My hand disappeared inside his. He held it for what seemed to me exactly the right amount of time.
It felt long enough to be personal, but not long enough to be threatening.
Then he released it with a slight, almost imperceptible squeeze.
“It’s… it’s nice to meet you, Mr. Mason,” I said, and my voice came out thin and reedy and nothing like the voice of a woman who was ready to do whatever was about to happen in this studio.
“Paul,” he corrected. Then, after a beat, “Actually, we should get started on the right foot. You’ll call me Master Paul.
” He said it with a faint smile that might have been humor, but his eyes didn’t smile.
His eyes watched me the way a doctor watches a patient—cataloguing symptoms, reading signs, arriving at a diagnosis before the patient has even finished describing what hurts.
Master Paul. The title seemed to enter my mind, and then somehow my body, like a physical thing, sending signals outward through my body that I felt in places I didn’t want to feel them.
I knew what that title meant. I’d learned enough in my employment at Selecta to know that Institute trainers—men and women certified through Selecta’s behavioral training program—used the honorific Master or Mistress as a marker of their authority over the young women assigned to their ‘care.’ I’d read about it in meeting briefs.
I’d typed notes about it. I’d filed it away in the same mental compartment where I kept all the other impossible things I’d learned since walking through Selecta’s gleaming doors.
But I hadn’t expected to encounter one. And definitely not here, today.
The call sheet—which I’d read six times on the elevator ride down to the twenty-first floor, my eyes skipping over the words as if speed-reading might make them less real—had said nothing about an Institute trainer.
It had listed wardrobe, lighting setups, set locations, and a brief note about talent direction that I’d assumed meant a photographer telling me where to stand.
“I didn’t…” I started, and stopped. I could feel the crease forming between my eyebrows, the one my mother used to smooth away with her thumb when I was a teenager, telling me that frowning would give me wrinkles. “I didn’t know there would be a… that you were…”
“A man?” he supplied, with that same faint smile. “Or a trainer?”
“Either,” I whispered.
He studied me for a moment. That focused, unhurried gaze moved over my face—my eyes, my mouth, the blush I could feel climbing from my collarbone to my jaw—and then down, briefly, to my white-knuckled grip on the call sheet.
He didn’t leer. He didn’t let his eyes linger anywhere they shouldn’t have.
But the assessment was thorough, and I had the unshakable sense that he had already seen things about me that I hadn’t shown anyone, things I hadn’t even shown myself.
“Melissa asked me to participate,” he said.
“She thinks the material will be best served by a dynamic that’s authentic.
Not posed. Not directed in the traditional sense.
Her Secret Garden is about real responses, Anne.
Real submission. You can’t get that from a photographer saying ‘turn left, tilt your chin, look vulnerable.’ You get it from a dynamic that creates the conditions for those responses to emerge naturally. ”
I opened my mouth to reply, but nothing came out.
The words real submission echoed in my skull.
I thought of Penelope’s office. The desk.
The paddle. The strap-on. The orgasm that had torn through me like a natural disaster while my boss held my hips and drove into me.
Was that real submission? It had felt real.
It had felt like the most real thing that had ever happened to me, and in the week since, I’d lain awake every night replaying it with a mixture of horror and longing that left me tangled in my sheets, my hand between my legs, my face burning in the dark.
“I’m not…” I tried again. “I’ve never done anything like this. I’m just… They said it would be a photo shoot. Melissa and Penelope said I’d try on some lingerie and they’d take pictures. She didn’t say anything about…”
“About me,” he finished. His voice was gentle, but I could sense it was the gentleness of a man who understood exactly how frightened I was and had decided not to pretend otherwise.
“I know. And I know that makes this harder. But I want you to hear something, Anne, and I want you to hear it clearly.”
He took a half step closer. He didn’t quite move into my personal space, but he came close enough that I could smell him. Cedar. Something warm and slightly spiced beneath it. Clean skin.
“Nothing is going to happen in this studio that you don’t need,” he said.
He waited, as if to let his words sink in. Need… not want.
“What you want right now is to run. I can see it. Your body is screaming it—your shoulders, your jaw, the way you’re holding that call sheet like a life preserver. You want to turn around and walk out and go back to your desk and pretend none of this is happening.”
The accuracy of his statement made my eyes sting. I blinked rapidly, refusing to cry. Not here. Not in front of him.
Not in front of the people I could see moving around the sets behind him: technicians adjusting lights, someone carrying a garment bag, a woman with cropped silver hair crouched beside a camera on a tripod, peering through the viewfinder with clinical concentration.
“But what you need,” Paul continued, and his voice dropped, just slightly, into a register that seemed to bypass my ears entirely and arrive somewhere in the center of my chest, “is to stay. To trust the process. To let someone who knows what he’s doing guide you through the thing that’s been building inside you since long before you walked into Selecta. ”
I stared at him. My lips had parted. My breath came in shallow little sips that I couldn’t deepen no matter how hard I tried. The call sheet wavered in my hands.
“How do you…” My voice cracked. “How do you know what’s building inside me?”
Something shifted in his expression. Not softening—he didn’t seem like a man who softened—but something opened, briefly, like a door left ajar.
“Because I’ve spent my career working with girls exactly like you,” he said simply.
“Girls who feel too much and don’t know what to do with it.
Girls who’ve been told their whole lives that wanting to submit is weakness, or sickness, or something to be ashamed of.
Girls who walk into rooms like this one shaking and fighting and telling themselves they don’t want what their bodies are begging for.
” He paused. “I’ve never been wrong about one yet. ”