The drive began uneventfully, at least by the standards of naked and gagged women driving Cadillacs with tinted windows through downtown Atlanta, but about twelve minutes into the drive, her phone did light up with another Ring notification. Ximena had returned to Isabel’s door back in Castleberry Hill. A minute later, she got an incoming call from her, just as Mistress Lanfear had predicted.
“Uuhhhh,“ Isabel groaned through the gag. And the sad thing was that Mistress Lanfear had also been right that Isabel would have had a hard time resisting answering at this point if she’d been able, maybe even browbeaten into turning back, even though talking with anyone from the COA at the moment was still the last thing she wanted to do.
She let the call go to voicemail.
Only a few minutes after that, Isabel was turning off of Peachtree Street into the leafy, tucked-away enclave of Sherwood Forest. Soon after that, she reached the address that Mistress Lanfear had given her. Adalynn’s parents’ new house was among the smaller ones in the neighborhood, a simple, sprawling, dun-brown ranch among many larger, stately, two- and even three-floor homes. And even if Isabel were inclined to doubt her navigation system, the sign in the yard at the front corner of the driveway would have been a giveaway. A spoof of the more familiar version, it read:
In this house, we believe
The Dark One and all the Forsaken
Are bound in Shayol Ghul
Beyond the Great Blight
Bound by the Creator
At the moment of Creation
Bound until the end of Time.
Isabel laughed even through the gag as she pulled into the short driveway, then FaceTimed Mistress Lanfear as promised. On a small whim, she turned on the overhead light in the car to give her mistress a better view.
This time, Mistress Lanfear picked up on the first ring. Isabel was about to say I’m here as best she could with the red rubber ball in her mouth, but Adalynn didn’t wait and make her. She gave a quick smile of acknowledgement at the light falling on Isabel’s gagged face. “Glad you made it, Isari,” she said. “Go ahead in.” The two-car garage door rolled up and the light on the overhead motor came on, and Isabell pulled in. As the garage door closed behind her, Isabel pointed to the ball her in her mouth and gave Mistress Lanfear a questioning look.
Mistress Lanfear’s emerald eyes sharpened momentarily, and she shook her head. “Just a little more. Go into the house, there will be a big open space on the right with the kitchen and living room and stairs down to the family room and the rest of the downstairs. Straight ahead will be the hallway to the bedrooms, with the master bedroom at the end. Leave your coat and boots and hat in the little nook to the side as you go in, then go on through past the kitchen to the living room—well, the living room area, it’s all one big space—and turn on the lights. There’s something there I want you to see before the gag comes off.” As she said this, Mistress Lanfear herself was walking out of the library or office she had been working in, her face and the impossibly distracting sul’dam dress and her breasts underneath it fading from view as she walked into a darker hallway, leaving only her voice.
Isabel rolled her eyes and gave a brief uuuhhh, but got out of the car with the gag still securely buckled behind her neck and under her chin. Sure enough, the door into the house was unlocked, and there was a little closet nook to the left. Isabel hung her coat on a waiting hanger, stashed the hat on the shelf above the hanger bar, and then shed her boots. She shook and wrestled her blond mane back over her shoulders, then picked up the phone again and headed into the living room. There was just enough light from the garage to see the light switch. She flipped it on.
The living room had a high, angled ceiling, higher than one would have expected from the street. The angle swept up away from the street side, so the rear of the house was higher, and floor-to-ceiling windows that apparently spanned both this floor and the one below it, which also would have been invisible from the road, as the house was built into a hill, gave a beautiful view of the little creek behind. A flatscreen even larger than the one in Isabel’s apartment hung above an elegant gas fireplace, and a rectangle formed by a sectional, a chaise lounge, and an armchair was positioned for a group to watch TV. A mirror-backed liquor shelf close at hand held probably forty bottles of different spirits.
At best, one percent of Isabel’s brain registered these views.
There, rising from a reclining position on the chaise lounge, red and blue dress with lightning symbols highlighting every beautiful curve above her waist, silver bracelet on her wrist, was Adalynn—Mistress Lanfear—in the flesh. The utterly perfect flesh. She was grinning like the cat that caught the canary, and the brilliant silver collar at her hip might as well have been, too.
“Welcome, marath’damane.”
Isabel’s eyelids climbed backwards over her skull. “Aaaeee!!” She cried through the gag. Reflexively, her hands shot back to the buckle at the back of her neck.
Mistress Lanfear somehow crossed the room with blinding speed, particularly in the long dress and five-inch Christian Louboutins. Isabel had only had a second or two to fumble with the buckle, nowhere near enough to actually take it off, before her mistress’ hands were there on hers. Her mistress’ face, those blazing emerald eyes and lustrous midnight hair, were now only inches from her own. Even just that first firm touch of their hands was electric, and she began to feel the heat and electricity building in her again, the frustrated partial release from earlier making itself known again, the prison bars inside her rattling ferociously under the sudden onslaught of feeling.
“Did I say you could touch that?” Mistress Lanfear asked.
Isabel’s fingers stilled, but she said nothing, frozen, doe-eyed, both too overwhelmed and too busy drinking in the sight of Mistress Lanfear here, really here, right in front of her! Her breathing began to quicken.
“Isari? Isari. Mistress asked you a question.”
Her breathing quickened still further, but she still couldn’t force any words out, could not so much as try to mumble something through the gag.
Mistress Lanfear shook her head sternly. “I leave you alone for a while and this is what happens. I’ll have to remind myself never to do that again. Well, time for some remedial education.” She spun Isabel around, then marched her across the room to the fireplace. As she approached, two stones in the façade just beneath the overhang of the mantel, one near each upper corner of the façade, rolled back and away. From the recesses revealed behind them, Mistress Lanfear withdrew two stainless steel cuffs lined with faux suede, each on a long nylon tether. She had lost none of her practiced efficiency as she fastened a cuff around each of Isabel’s wrists.
Isabel’s mind at this point was barely coherent enough to register her shock at the built-in devices. Why on earth does Adalynn’s parents’ house have anything like this in it? An extraordinary possibility took shape in the back of her mind, but in the back of her mind was where it stayed for now, because the rest of her mind was still dominated by her mistress’ impossible presence and the surging erotic fire in her sex again, the lightning once again beginning to dance along every nerve, more insistent now than it had been even at her loft, even with the release—powerful but partial—that her mistress had brought her to there.
Bound facing the fireplace with her arms spread, Isabel could only strain to look back over her shoulder. She got the sense that Mistress Lanfear had knelt down and was withdrawing something, or some things, from under the chaise lounge.
“Mihhwehhf?” She asked uncertainly.
The first thing she felt then was the tip of something soft but firm under her chin, lifting it and turning it back to face forward, at the fireplace and mantel. More distant memories of those past summers reactivated, and she almost melted, leaning forward onto the façade to steady herself.
