Bound to the Turnings of the Wheel

"Bauer! What the hell is going on there?"

Even in the heavy shadows, with the only light being the ambient light through the gauzy curtains, Isabel crouched lower on the couch and crossed her arms over her naked body.

"Two different people just smelled smoke and said it sounded like a transformer blew in your loft!" Isabel knew well enough that Ximena herself would have been one of them, and she just would have said it like that to make it sound like she had even more complaints about her.

A headache that had nothing to do with the phenomenon that had been responsible for that fact earlier started beating on the inside of Isabel's skull.

"Your car's in the lot, I know you're there!"

If Mistress had let me wear clothes, maybe I'd answer.

Honestly, more likely I wouldn't.

If Mistress were actually here, she might make me. Now there was a humiliating thought. And unlike many others, this one did not stir even the faintest tremor of erotic thrills in her. Actually, that probably means she wouldn't make me. She always somehow knows.

"If you make me call the fire department, I swear to God I'm calling the police, too, just because!"

Isabel cringed, and the threat almost worked. Her hand hesitated on her phone, about to at least talk through the Ring. But her nerves were too fried, and a thought occurred to her, as Adalynn's words from only minutes earlier came back to her. She was willing to do a lot to not deal with this tonight.

"I just can't even," Ximena said as she pulled out her phone. Isabel tensed, watching the woman's fingers. But Ximena was cautious enough not to dial 911, whether that was due to a genuine desire not to push the envelope too much when the smell of smoke was faint and not growing, or because she was at least a little afraid of Isabel's father, who owned the loft. Just by the number of buttons Ximena pushed, Isabel could see that she wasn't calling an emergency line. And it was after hours.

Isabel's hopes were dashed, though. Ximena wasn't actually calling the fire department after hours, which would have given her at least until morning, and maybe more considering that the next day was Christmas Eve. "Brian, it's Ximena. Are you on-site? OK, well, did you leave the master key in the office? I think we need to do an emergency inspection on Unit 404. Both for health and possible rule violations. I can still smell a little bit of smoke from inside, and we had another resident say he heard something like a transformer blow but from inside the unit, and no one is answering." She hung up. "I'll be back in fifteen minutes. I really hope that you're not OK in there, because I'll be really pissed if you've just torched your unit and you're just making me stand here because don't want to deal with it."

It's not really my unit, it's Daddy's. Also, I didn't really torch it, just singed it a little. And you're always pissed. And I always don't want to deal with it.

None of those barbed retorts crossed her lips, and Ximena steamed off. Adrenalin pumping, Isabel dialed Adalynn's number. She still had it on speed-dial even after two years.

Adalynn picked up on the third ring. "Well, well! Been a while!" she quipped.

"Addie, I've changed my mind. I need to get out of here. Please tell me you were serious."

"Isabel, when I said ..."

"I'll go to Daddy if I have to, but I'd really ..."

"Isari," Adalynn continued more forcefully.

".. rather not, I just completely can't deal with all the questi ..."

"Isari," Adalynn pressed, and her voice had changed. Isabel's throat constricted closed. There was no doubt who was taking over. "Put me back on the TV, Isari. You babble less when you can see me, and I enjoy life more when I can see you."

"Ad ... Mistress, I'm going to be in big trouble here in fifteen minutes."

"Then you'd better put me on the TV, hadn't you, marath'damane? I just rewatched the ending scene, by the way. Still as ridiculous as the first time."

Isabel had by now gotten Adalynn's face back on the big screen. The raven-haired woman was not reclining on her couch anymore, she had her own phone slightly farther away from her face, so Isabel could see both more of her body, still wearing the exquisite sul'dam dress, and the even more exquisite silver bracelet sill on her wrist, the silver leash still connected, though her hip where the collar would have rested was out of sight below the level of her desk. She was seated at a large desk in a small library, or small corner of one somewhere. The wall behind her was half covered in sturdy, build-in oak bookshelves, the other half in maps or charts of some kind that Isabel couldn't really see in the dim yellow light.

"Mistress, I know, but I'm a little busy freaking out to rehash that right now ... the COA president was here and she's coming back in fifteen minutes with the skeleton key and she's going to be coming in here, and I'm going to have to get dressed and deal with her and I just can't ..."

"Isari," Mistress Lanfear cut her off, taking full advantage of the Dolby Atmos system once more. "Your gag is still within arm's reach. Put it back on. Now. I won't waste your time, but your babbling will."

"Mistress, really?"

"That's a demerit, sub of mine. Now do it before you make things worse for both yourself and me."

Isabel didn't even have the mental capacity to spare to think about what kind of punishment her mistress might come up with her from a thousand miles away to purge a demerit. She spared a faint thought that they didn't even have that kind of relationship anymore, but that was a feeble thought indeed as she found herself reaching over to the nightstand where she had dropped the gag earlier. The ball found its way behind her teeth once again, and both the main strap and the chinstrap were quickly fastened as tightly as Mistress Lanfear herself would have done. Without even thinking, Isabel slid back into the mindset she had adopted so effortlessly when they were together, letting her pleading soul speak through her eyes, letting them express, even highlight, the knowledge of her helplessness and her trust that Mistress would make everything OK.

"Much better. Now, put your special heels on. The ones with the steel heel that I got you on Etsy that second summer."

Isabel's eyes went wide, and tears welled up in them unexpectedly. Mistress will be so disappointed ... man, I just fuck everything up ... without any further prompting, she moved back to where she had knelt for her display so recently and knelt again, head bowed in apology and supplication. She reached into the ruins of the fabric memento box and lifted two steel stilettos to show her mistress. The heels alone. She had indeed kept them, but everything but the heel had been reduced to ash earlier. In fact, even the metal heels, all that remained of them, were still hot to the touch.

"Oh," Mistress Lanfear said. "Marath'damane. Isari. Look at me." Isabel looked up and saw that the woman had risen from her desk, and her head was now slightly above the level of her phone, so she looked down. But while she was still very much in character, there was still somehow a softness in her smile now, one that reminded Isabel that Adalynn Shields was still very close to the surface of Mistress Lanfear's persona. "You kept them. That's what matters for tonight. But don't get me wrong, Isari. I will see those gorgeous legs of yours in the heels that they were meant for again. And again and again and again. But now is not the time. Listen to me. Are you listening?"

Isabel nodded. "Ehhf, Wihfwehf."

"Do you still have your big trench coat, boots, and the fur hat with the ear warmers by the front entrance?"

Isabel nodded again.

"When I hang up, start your car warming up by remote, then text me the contact info for this COA person. Then put those outer clothes on. Nothing else. It's frigid outside, but those will be warm enough, and I don't want you rummaging through your unit for clothes and make-up and all the rest, we don't have that time. I'm texting you the address of my parents' house now. Charge your phone in the car. Drive to this address. I have the ability to open the garage door from where I am. And do not remove the gag between now and when you get there. I don't even want you babbling to yourself in the car, or being tempted to answer any calls you might get from the COA, and keeping you silenced will keep you focused. When you get there, FaceTime me back, and I'll open the garage. Do you understand?"

Isabel was flabbergasted, but worse, aroused, even though it was fifteen degrees outside.

"Ehhf, Wihfwehf."

"Do you need me to repeat anything?"

Isabel shook her head. "Fwo, Wifhwehf."

"And?"

Isabel hesitated, not sure what to say for a moment. But one thing came to her as worth saying, even if it might not have been the specific response Mistress Lanfear was looking for. "Ann I hruff oo." And I trust you. She tactfully left off what she had added earlier to that—I trust you too much.

"Then get started."

Isabel again retrieved her phone from the top of the TV, now down to 12% charge. True to her word, the text from her mistress was already there with the address. Despite the low battery, Isabel used her phone flashlight again now, knowing she was going to be able to charge in her car soon enough. She found her way to the coat closet by the front door, and quickly put on her black leather walking boots, and her cashmere trench coat that came all the way down to her ankles. Finally, she donned her big, fluffy fur hat, and settled the ear warmers into place. One would have to get surprisingly close in the dark, even with the streetlights in the parking lot of this little loft complex, to see that a red rubber ball filled her mouth. And one would have to get even closer to see that she was wearing nothing under her outerwear. There were security cameras mounted on the lightpoles, and if someone watching them paused the video and zoomed in, there would probably be an angle from which they could see the gag, but even they would have trouble being certain that she was naked beneath her coat.

The most nervous, adrenalin-pulsing part of the trip was the first minute, from the door of her loft, down the back stairs, and out to the parking lot. The indoor lighting would have made it much harder to hide what she was wearing—and not wearing. And an encounter with Ximena at that point might have caused both of them to spontaneously combust. Fortunately, nothing of the sort happened, and she was soon safely behind the tinted windows of her car, and had seldom been more grateful for them. They hadn't been her idea, because the car was a hand-me-down from her father, a 2010 silver-grey Cadillac CTS that was far too corporate for an undergrad, even an Emory one. It came in handy today, though, as did the pop-up navigation screen, which she quickly raised from within the dash and plugged in the address that Mistress Lanfear had given her.

Her eyebrows raised slightly when she saw the destination on the map. It was in the Sherwood Forest pocket neighborhood in Atlanta, backing up onto Clear Creek. The neighborhood wasn't all that far from Castleberry Hill, certainly closer than her parents' place in Mt. Paran Parkway. And while Sherwood Forest was nowhere near as expensive as Mt. Paran Parkway, she had never understood Adalynn's parents to have even Sherwood Forest kind of money. When Isabel and Adalynn had met at dance camp all those years ago, Adalynn's parents had lived up in Cartersville, and not in any kind of mansion there.

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.