Page 12 of Sold at Auction

The collar settled into place, its weight a constant pressure against my throat. I swallowed hard, the sensation both constraining and oddly welcome, as if it could serve as a reminder that I had no choice, that being a columba in the Order of Ostia had nothing to do with anything I wanted.

“Now, we begin your training,” Malleus announced, stepping back to survey his work. “Follow me.”

Naked except for the leathers, I followed him out of the cell and into the labyrinthine halls of what Malleus had called the mithraeum, each step echoing ominously in the dimly lit passageways. We passed through a stone arch that had a carving of a man apparently wrestling a bull above it, into an expansive space filled with what looked to me like gym equipment: treadmills, stationary bicycles, free weights, and weight-machines—even a climbing wall.

A few young women, dressed like me only in leather restraints and occasionally sports bras, and a few breathtakingly muscular men in black shorts, were in the middle of what looked like strenuous workouts. I felt like the presence of other girls who had to display their breasts and waxed pussies just as I did should seem reassuring. Instead, it made me blush hard, because I could tell, simply from the facial expressions I could see in the mirrors that lined two walls of the room, that they knew so much more about what it meant to belong to the Order. When I saw one of them looking back in the reflection, her face curious, I bit my lip and looked down at the mat-covered stone floor.

“Welcome to the Hall of Physical Training,” Malleus said. “Today, you will push your limits. You will sweat, you will struggle, but you will emerge stronger.”

He put his hand on my bottom as if to remind me of the power over me he had demonstrated so thoroughly over the last—what?—sixteen hours.

Such a short time, I thought, and yet the outside world seems like a dream.

“We’ll get you warmed up on the treadmill, first, columba,” he declared, urging me towards the nearest one with a push and a little squeeze that made me whimper softly as the soreness from my spanking reasserted itself. “You don’t need a sports bra with your little breasts, so don’t ask for one out of modesty.”

I felt my mouth twist to the side in frustration. He had read my mind, or maybe he had seen the glances I sent in the direction of the other Ostia girls going through their workouts. I got up on the treadmill. Malleus pressed the green Go button, and quickly raised the speed to five. My brow furrowing at the discomfort in my backside, I started to run.

I had never considered myself very athletic, though I had run track and field in high school, just barely making varsity my senior year. I wanted to show Malleus that I had retained my fitness, though: I ran a few times a week and even did some resistance training at the gym.

From the treadmill, Malleus took me to an open section of floor and guided me through a series of body-weight exercises, each more grueling than the last. His hands were on me, adjusting my posture from time to time. I chewed my cheek as I caught myself wishing he would touch me less professionally, and I felt my face heat up as I remembered how he had interrupted my naughtiness when he had entered my cell.

My muscles screamed in protest as I went through the sets of burpees and squats Malleus assigned. I felt my leathers getting sweaty. They seemed impossible to ignore, though the other girls in the training hall seemed practiced at it.

The squats were the most embarrassing part because Malleus stood behind me to check my form, and he put his huge, strong hand under my backside to help me get down lower. His fingers held my bare pussy firmly but without providing the friction I desperately longed for. The hot blood surged into my scalp at the casual way he handled my most intimate places. Much worse, I felt certain he could feel me getting wet with my helpless craving for more.

“Good, columba,” he murmured after I completed a particularly deep squat, with his mortifying help. “Bene.” His rare approval spurred me on, igniting a fire within me to keep going, to endure.

Malleus alternated my training between strength and endurance for an hour or so that passed in a haze of physical torment and determination. By the time he called for a break and showed me to the shower, my body was trembling with exhaustion, my breaths coming in ragged gasps. Despite the fatigue, a hard-won sense of accomplishment filled me.

“More cardio this afternoon, columba,” he told me. “Different muscles tomorrow. “We need to bring your fitness to as high a level as we can in the time we’ve got.”

My mind burned with questions, but I already knew what Malleus’ answer would be, if I were foolish enough to ask, for example, what he meant by the time we’ve got.

He took me back to my cell and brought me a protein-heavy breakfast on a tray. Eggs, avocado, yogurt. Delicious, and, I knew, calculated to build my muscle mass.

For what?

Malleus refused to tell me. Or, because I had stopped asking useless questions, I supposed he simply hadn’t decided to tell me. When he took away the breakfast tray, he brought a book—an honest-to-goodness paper book. The Iliad.

He didn’t tell me to read it, but it represented the only possible way to pass time in my cell during the hours I spent locked in there. I read it until he came to fetch me for my next activity. That first day, the next activity, and the only other activity, was the long cardio workout Malleus had told me about. I read almost the whole epic.

Falling asleep that night, after a day that seemed like a dream, I thought about Chryseis and Briseis, and Helen of Troy, the young women who seemed—I had never known this, I realized—to have caused all the problems at Troy, because men needed to fuck them so very badly. Fuck toys, all of them—even the royal Helen. But Chryseis and Briseis were prizes: concubines. Fuck toys and nothing more, to the warriors who had won them for their beds. Girls like me: valued only for the pleasure men could find in thrusting their hard cocks inside the girls’ innocent bodies.

The whole sad, violent story had happened because Agamemnon took Briseis away from Achilles, the same way Paris had taken Helen from Menelaus. I knew Malleus had given me the book for a reason, and I knew I couldn’t ask what it was. I had a strong suspicion he would tell when, though, when he thought I was ready.

Days bled into one another as I found myself immersed in a labyrinthine world of what I came to realize soon enough was international espionage. The New York mithraeum, a warm but sterile subterranean fortress, became my whole reality. Its walls echoed with the footsteps of those who had come before me, each step a testament to the rigorous path I now trod in a direction I couldn’t ask, and my miles wouldn’t tell me.

“Observation is your first weapon,” Malleus declared, his voice a stern melody that resonated through the dimly lit classroom. I sat alone on a hard wooden bench, my body bare as always, save for the Ostia leathers that marked me as their possession. The leather cuffs encased my wrists and ankles, my thighs, my waist, my neck, a silent reminder of my servitude.

“Your eyes must see everything,” he continued, pacing before a large screen on which he’d just shown me an instructional video featuring a young, beautifully dressed woman, columba Greta, at a cocktail party full of tuxedoed men. She had used her eye-catching beauty to conceal how much intelligence she was gathering all the while. “And yet reveal nothing.”

I had been given a notepad and a pen. In the hours in my cell, I went over the notes I took, and Malleus always tested me thoroughly the next day. For this video, I knew, he might ask for example, “How did columba Greta ask about the high-tension transmission lines?” and I would answer, “By steering the man who had brought her champagne towards the magnate, and listening in at the same time she kept the conversation with the other guy going.”

“Bene, columba,” Malleus would say, I hoped, though the rational part of my mind thought me insane for hoping it.

Each word Malleus spoke seemed like a puzzle piece, fitting into the larger picture of my training. He explained the subtleties of surveillance, the art of blending into the shadows, and the necessity of reading people like open books. His teachings were precise, methodical, and I drank them in eagerly, my mind a sponge absorbing every drop of knowledge.

I lost count of the days. By the time Malleus brought me to the Hall of Sexual Training for the first time, I had almost managed to forget about my nakedness and my leathers. My physical training had progressed to the point where Malleus no longer needed to adjust my posture or support me.

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