Anne-Marie had understood it before they had - had understood the strange, angry, fascinated reaction that Charli (the girl whose lover had asked for her head to be shaved, to shame her, and who Anne-Marie had decided to keep like that for a few months longer, so deeply had it affected her) had been apparently unable to control when she was around the new girl.
She also understood that, once the new girl - known only as Ink - had been brought to an acceptance of her condition, to understand the the iron reality of her status (in truth, it had been mainly force and clarity about the will-to-cruelty, at first - she had been sold to the Castle by a biker gang, and had been used to considering herself a free spirit), her reaction to Charli had been totally different to the way she was with any other girl.
As far as most people saw it, they just drove each other mad - simply hated each other. Petty spitefulness, wild sobbing tantrums, each provoking punishment but seemingly unable, unwilling to control herself, to stop the vicious whispered insults, the deliberate spreading of poison in the rare opportunities for whispered gossip between girls.
Anne-Marie herself, of course, had set - and now rigidly enforced - the rules against girls talking to each other as a specific instance on the prohibition on girls talking at all unless required to by a free person. It was made clear to the girls that, as inmates of the Castle, no-one was in the least interested in anything that went on inside their heads; that their mouths existed primarily for the sexual satisfaction of their betters.
On the other hand, and so cleverly that hardly anyone realised, she made it inevitable that there would be moments - certain points during the day, in certain corners and hallways, where the girls would have the opportunity to talk, if only briefly, if only in soft, nervous, hurried whispers.
And of course, all of these positions were planned - and were covered by secret cameras and microphones.
This arrangement had multiple benefits; it supported Anne-Marie’s awe-inspiring reputation for omniscience, of course, and provided entertainment (in the form of edited highlights that were either funny, or arousing, or offered insight into a vulnerability of a favoured girl) for those senior members who knew about the arrangements. But there was a primary and deeper reason, which was this; Anne-Marie’s supernatural-seeming ability to keep in hand a large group (there were never less than 15 girls, and at times over 20) of beautiful young women in a state of perpetual Stockholm fixation whereby they more or less prettily observed the obscene and degrading rules of the Castle, which impacted so ruthlessly, so intimately, so cruelly, so destructively onto every manageable aspect of their existence - this ability was based in a deep understanding of group psychology.
For while it was true that perhaps one girl in 5 who was kept at the Castle on a permanent basis was a natural submissive - a girl who found the regime somehow comforting in the way that it contained, controlled, used and abused her - the majority of girls had required a careful, deliberate (and to Anne-Marie and the majority of the longer-term members, deeply satisfying) conditioning process to bring them to the state of pretty and helpless compliance that was demanded of them.
And an important part of this conditioning was peer pressure. It acted differently on each girl, of course (sex slaves they might be, but no-one wanted robots, or pretty bodies without personality; each girl’s reaction to the whip, to sexual humiliation, to rough or multiple penetration, to gentle, sensual deep kissing from a grossly obese and sweaty stranger, was savoured for its particular flavour - and each member had their particular tastes), but nevertheless, the forced company of other pretty girls, all subjected to the same bizarre, shockingly harsh discipline and shameful demands had a powerful normalising effect, and this effect was much increased by the fact of girls having social relationships. The heavy policing and deliberate restrictions on this aspect of their reality was precisely calculated to heighten this effect.
For a girl to know that the beautiful, high breasted, long-limbed unfortunate who is smiling as prettily as she can through her tears as her nipples are being targetted with a dog-whip by a drunken guest while both her lower holes are being roughly ploughed by his friends, all in the middle of the clubroom, to know that this girl is a graduate of the Sorbonne, with two degrees in Art History and Philosophy, that she is here because she stole her sister’s lover (the man who brought her here), that she says she hates older men using her, but to be aware that she has confided in another girl that the reason she hates them is because they often make her orgasm so deliriously she can’t remember her name, and that she fears that this might make her ‘like all these other little whores’ - this sort of knowledge cements in a girl’s psyche the notion that to be held in such circumstances is somehow natural, that there is a social order to it - a social order in which she has a place. To which she belongs. Which is somehow natural, ordained.
So it was Anne-Marie who saw in the volatility of Ink and Charli’s interactions the reality that, for whatever reason, each found the sight of the other, constrained so ruthlessly by the requirements of being a Castle girl; used at will, in the most intimate ways, by anyone who chose, cruelly punished, required to present herself at all times as a provocation to rape, oppressed by a thousand humiliating and petty rules, all punishable by degrading treatment, that each found this sight intensely distressing for the simple reason that they recognised each other, they had known each other outside, and that for each, seeing the other here, used so, clarified in an agonising way what each had herself been brought to.
They never acknowledged this, and Anne-Marie never told them she knew. But she had enquiries made through an agency (at her own expense - she was curious) and discovered that they had been at the same college. That they hadn’t been friends, but that they had mutual friends. That in fact, each had despised the other; Charli had been a poor girl on the make - a calculating social climber, while Ink had been a rebellious society deb. They had sneered at each other, both proud.
And now, each had to serve, in the other’s presence, with the same demure eagerness, anyone who turned up; each had to accept - to encourage, if appropriate - and with a softness that seemed genuine, the roughest and most degrading intimacies (it didn’t matter one bit whether the softness was genuine or not - what was required was perfect presentation, not a perfect inner acceptance. In fact, the latter often became boring, no matter how luscious the tits, how slender the thighs, how pretty the tears, how deep the throat. To look into the eyes of a girl who is playing perfectly the part of an uptown beauty shocked and surprised by how much she likes being sodomised in the hallway outside the members library by a man she has only just met, while you play with her breasts; to look into her eyes and see her inability to disguise her terrible despair can be an arousing experience - albeit it one calculated to result in further trauma for the girl in question).
So for Ink and Charli both, seeing the other as a willing slave girl only brought home in raw terms to each her own soul-crushing, helpless enslavement.
And so Anne-Marie had arranged for the two to present lesbian tableaux in the little drawing room. Both had had to be whipped before they would participate, and this first tryst had been a wonderful entertainment, as they embraced each other, trembling, with tears still in their eyes, mascara-stains running into the lipstick as they sobbed and kissed, as their hands tentatively, under orders, watched by a dozen or so members, found each other’s sex lips. Charli’s cries as she was fucked with a frankly ludicrously long and grotesque strapon were unhinged - but, well-trained now, the hands holding the heel of each shoe never let go.
The lesbian session was cut short as each girl was in demand by masters. Ink had to be rested for three days, Charli for two after that session.
Two weeks later, again without preamble, Anne-Marie had them perform again. Each was to bring the other to orgasm as quickly as possible. The slowest achiever would be whipped, the fastest to orgasm would spend a day with her head in the Box, chained naked in the hallway.
Arranging it as a contest kept the demands for satisfaction at bay until it was over, but again each girl was vigorously and harshly used. Ink was both whipped between the legs and forced to experience the Box for the first time.
It was Charli, though, who seemed to suffer most. She had several hysterical incidents, which was unlike her. Anne-Marie smiled. There had been a part of Charli which had been smug, self-satisfied - this was why her head had originally been shaved. It was entertaining to be breaking this last scrap of the girl’s self-image,
Ink cried often, and had a soft sadness about her which was nevertheless highly attractive - she was much requested and much used over the next weeks, responding with increasingly helpless and obvious sexual arousal. Her lack of expertise in the area of oral performance was remarked upon, and during this period Anne-Marie tasked the staff with remedying this. Ink had been, frankly, so wild at the outset that there had been a degree of nervousness about this. Now though, she proved easy to train. Although she sobbed a great deal, she became sweetly expert at impaling herself fully on a man’s sex, hands crossed meekly behind her back, managing the convulsions in her neck to give pleasure and becoming very conscientious about the presentation of her breasts and the movements of her haunches; “Just because your mouth is full of a man doesn’t mean that your duty to invite rape is diminished - you have two other holes to offer.“
Members kept asking when she would stage a rematch between the two girls, but Anne-Marie was vague, and carefully rigged the timetables so that opportunities for members to stage their own amateur versions were minimised.
As ever, Anne-Marie knew what she was about. For five weeks she kept them on separate duties, so that they hardly saw each other.
The next time they performed, it was at once clear that something had changed. Neither girl could keep from staring at the other, unless their eyes met, in which case each dropped their gaze, flushing. They seemed weirdly shy of each other.
When they finally did touch, it was clear to all but the most addled person in the room that they were in love.
Anne-Marie’s smile was controlled, as always, but she was quietly satisfied.
The possibilities with girls who were in love were interesting, entertaining, and could prove lucrative, too.
The soft despair that accompanied the tenderness in each caress showed that, on some level, the girls understood that this soft, desperate feeling that had invaded each of them (over time in Ink’s case; revealed to her in a flash as she had entered the room in Charli’s) would be heartlessly exploited in the service of the entertainment of the masters, and as a lever to further enslave them.
The only way to avoid the despairing agony of this, even if only for a moment, was to submerge themselves in sex.
It was a good show, and again, each girl was much ravaged in the aftermath.
Kept apart, they were brought together to give weekly shows for several months. These became increasingly wild, before they were sold as a pair for an astronomical price to a japanese consortium.
