Page 8 of Master Class

Edge’s face stayed fixed and frozen, but Clarissa saw something move like a shadow behind his dark eyes. “Have you been looking for a Master to train you for very long?”

“A few months,” Clarissa said. She felt a small tremor of uncertainty. She hadn’t rehearsed this line of possible questions and she felt herself stepping into uncertain ground.

“Where?”

“Pardon?”

“Where have you looked to find someone suitable?”

“Um… online, mainly,” she said, keeping her answer short.

“Did you meet with anyone?”

“No.”

“Why?”

Clarissa licked her lips. It was a nervous reaction. “I chatted to a couple of men through social media, but they were crude and vulgar,” she made up the story. “They seemed to want to intimidate me.”

Edge inhaled a deep breath and then nodded. He seemed satisfied. Slowly, Clarissa let the tension seep away.

Impulsively, Edge got to his feet and planted his big brawny hands flat on the desktop, so he was leaning over the edge of the desk towards her.

“Very well,” he said. “Come back tonight. We’ll go through the basics.”

Clarissa blinked, then started to smile in genuine relief. She let go of a breath she had been holding in her lungs and it came out from between her lips like the sound of a gasp.

“Thank you,” she started to stand and reach for her handbag. Her heart felt like it might burst from her chest. She was half out of the chair when a sudden thought struck her and she sat back down, pinching her expression with curiosity. “Can I ask you a question before I go, Mr. Edge?”

Nick Edge nodded. He didn’t sit.

“When I first arrived today, you called me Anna. Can I ask you why?”

The question gave Edge a long moment of pause. His face changed, becoming darker.

“Anna is the name of my business partner.”

Clarissa went through the charade of feigning surprise. “Really? A woman helps run your submission training business?”

“No,” Edge shook his head. “I had another business. Anna and I worked with runaway kids, helping them when they had nowhere else to turn. We arranged food and shelter for them – got them off the streets and into care. That kind of thing.”

“Oh. I didn’t know.”

“Then one day, Anna was kidnapped.”

“Kidnapped?”

Edge nodded and his eyes seemed to glaze over. His gaze turned inward with recollection of the moment.

“We were in an alley, and it was dark. We knew it was a place that street kids frequented when they were on the run. There was a young boy sleeping in a dumpster and a teenage girl hidden under some cardboard boxes. Anna went back to our vehicle to get them food. I heard a sudden screech of brakes. I turned back to see what was happening. On the street, a white van pulled up on the sidewalk and two men dressed in black got out. They were big men, well trained. They were dressed in black, their faces covered. I heard Anna scream. One of the men punched her in the face. As she started to fall to the ground the second man caught her and they dragged her into the back of the van. I started to run – but it happened too fast. There was nothing I could do to save her.”

Clarissa was truly horrified. She hadn’t known the details of the young woman’s disappearance. She could hear the pain, still coarse and raw, in Edge’s voice.

“The word on the street was that a sex-slave operation was working its way through Washington. They were hunting for girls to train and sell to men who could afford the price. Anna got caught in their net.”

“Is she still alive?”

Edge shook his head. “I don’t know. I hope so. I believe she’s still somewhere here in the city.”

“Being used as a sex slave?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry.” Clarissa didn’t know what else to say.

Edge sighed like he was letting go of all the memories and tension. “I changed the nature of our business overnight. I called in some buddies who I had served with in the military. Now we’re no longer helping street kids. Now our focus is to find the sex-slave traders. We’re hunting the men who kidnapped Anna… and all the other young girls who they prey on.”

“That sounds like grim, ugly work…”

“It’s a bleak and ugly world that most people don’t even know exist,” Edge said.

“And you called me Anna,” she brought the conversation back to her original question. “Do we look similar?”

“No,” Edge shook his head ruefully. “You look exactly the same. You look like a mirror image of her; the resemblance is uncanny.”

Clarissa gave a tepid little smile, but inflected it with genuine concern. “Is that fact going to inhibit my training?” It sounded a little selfish, and it was meant to. Clarissa had to play her part perfectly. But her question was also genuine. Did Edge have some kind of emotional connection to his missing business partner that would be a barrier to her sexual experience? If she couldn’t get this man to fuck her, her grandfather’s farm would be lost.

She wondered whether even Congressman Jansing had considered the possibility that Edge was so emotionally invested in the missing girl that for him to have sex with Clarissa would feel somehow like screwing his own sister.

“No,” Edge’s eyes turned hard as stone. “It won’t impair your training.”

He said not a word more.

Clarissa waited until she was sitting in the back seat of a cab and on her way home before she pulled the burner phone that Congressman Jansing had given her from her handbag.

She glanced surreptitiously at the driver and made sure he was focused on the road ahead, then thumbed the pre-programmed number. She pressed the phone to her ear and waited.

Congressman Wilton Jansing was standing in the corridors of the White House when one of the two phones in his pocket vibrated. He smiled apologetically at the man in the dark suit he was talking to, and reached into his pants.

He held up his finger to cut the other man’s words short.

“Sorry, Chuck,” he broadened his southern accent. “I really need to take this call.”

The other man nodded. Jansing turned his back to the man and began striding towards an open doorway, his footsteps echoing above the hushed buzz of milling voices.

“Well?” he demanded.

“Good news,” Clarissa said.

“He fucked you?”

“No. Not yet. But he’s willing to train me as a submissive. I’m going back to his home tonight.”

Jansing grunted. It was progress, but it wasn’t the news he needed. He pressed his lips into a pale bloodless line. “The clock is ticking on your grandfather’s farm,” the Congressman warned.

“I know.”

“Then don’t fuck around. You don’t have that luxury.”

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