Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 94181 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 377(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94181 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 377(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
I’d been standing by the lighting rig near the bedroom set, reviewing the shot list with Darlene Gray, our videographer, when she came in. The studio door opened and Anne appeared in the threshold like a deer at the edge of a clearing—one step in, then a pause, her green eyes sweeping the space with the wide, cataloguing attention of someone taking in far more than she wanted to.
And there was plenty to take in. The studio occupied most of the twenty-first floor’s east wing, a cavernous space that had been subdivided into five distinct sets, four of them meticulous re-creations of rooms you might find in a modest farmhouse somewhere in one of Selecta’s New Modesty communities. The fifth set didn’t have anything in it at the moment; it stood ready to represent the rare scene occurring outside the New Modesty home.
The kitchen had whitewashed cabinets, a butcher-block island, and copper pots hanging from a rack above the stove. The living room had a worn leather sofa, a braided rug, and bookshelves filled with titles I knew Melissa had personally selected—homemaking manuals, devotional guides, the kind of domestic literature that would read as authentic in a wide shot.
The bathroom had white tile, a claw-foot tub, and a mirror positioned at an angle that Darlene had spent forty minutes calibrating for optimal reflection during shoots. And the bedroom—the centerpiece, the set where most of the Surrender Line campaign would be photographed—featured a wrought-iron bed frame, white linen sheets, and curtains that moved in the breeze from a hidden fan, because nothing sold intimacy like the suggestion of an open window in a room where a girl was about to take her clothes off.
Anne’s gaze traveled from set to set, and I watched the color climb her neck. Not a blush, exactly. More like a trace of color, the skin pinkening in patches along her throat and across her collarbones where the cream blouse didn’t quite conceal it. Her lips parted. Her fingers tightened on the call sheet.
She was terrified. That much was obvious to anyone with eyes, and I had better eyes than most. Twelve years in the military, with five of them in psychological operations, plus eleven as an Institute trainer, had given me an education in reading bodies that no university could match. I’d debriefed captured insurgents who’d shown less visible stress than Anne Chamberlain showed walking into a photography studio.
The tension lived in her shoulders, which were hiked a good inch and a half above their natural line. It lived in her jaw, which she had clenched so tightly I could see the muscles bunching beneath the skin. It lived in her hands, in the white-knuckled grip on that call sheet, and in her feet, which had stopped moving entirely, rooting her just inside the doorway as if her body had decided, independent of her conscious mind, that this was as far as it was willing to go.
But I knew something more from my Institute days as a dominant master of repressed girls just like Anne Chamberlain. Anne’s terror came much more from the dark, unknown depths inside her than from the novelty of the circumstances.
I excused myself from Marcus and crossed the studio floor toward her. I took my time. Not because I wanted to intimidate Anne, but because the way a man approaches a frightened, repressed, submissive woman in the first thirty seconds of her training tells her everything she needs to know about the next thirty days. I wanted those seconds to count.
* * *
Anne
I swallowed hard as the enormous, gorgeous man who seemed at least partly in charge of things here came toward me. He moved with a kind of unhurried grace that reminded me of a big predator: a tiger, maybe… aware of himself in space, aware of the effect his size and weight had on the smaller creatures, like me, around it. Each step looked measured. His polished, expensive shoes carried him toward me at a pace that gave me time to look at him, and looking at him was a problem.
He was significantly older than me. He seemed to be in his late forties, I guessed, maybe closer to fifty, though the years sat on him the way they sit on certain men, adding weight and authority rather than diminishing anything. His hair was dark with threads of silver at the temples, cropped close in a way that suggested military service rather than fashion.
His jaw had a square, uncompromising line that I couldn’t help thinking indicated a man who made decisions and lived with them. His eyes, though… they stopped my train of thought. No, derailed it. Brown, deep-set, and possessed of an attention so focused it felt like the touch of someone who didn’t feel much need to be gentle.