Anna looked down. She saw a syringe sticking out of her arm. The plunger was already pressed down, and something cool was beginning to flow through her veins. She reached up and plucked it out, the sting of pain almost as bright as the sting of betrayal, and gave Emily a look of shock and bewilderment in equal measures. "I know," her friend said, her chubby pink cheeks broadening into a beatific smile straight out of a horror movie. "I know. But you'll understand soon enough, darling. You'll thank me for doing this to you, I promise."

Anna tried to move away, not with any plan or intention but simply out of an instinctive need to put distance between herself and that creepy, overly bright smile. But her legs were already beginning to wobble underneath her, and she didn't manage more than a few tottering steps before Emily caught her wrist to prevent her from tumbling gracelessly onto the floor. "Whoa, there," the curvy redhead chuckled, her voice full of condescending cheer. "Let's be careful, okay? That stuff kicks in nice and quick. Wouldn't want you smacking that pretty face of yours on the linoleum, right?" Anna recognized the playfully mothering tone from countless nights on the town, but she couldn't connect it back to the fading pain in her arm and the memory of the other woman's viper-quick thrust.

Emily hooked Anna's arm around her shoulder, the height difference between them making Anna list heavily to one side as she sagged up against her betrayer. "Come on, silly," Emily cooed cheerfully, hefting Anna's weight and half-leading, half-dragging her around the kitchen island and into the living room. "Let's get you onto the couch before you fall over, okay?" Anna wanted to scream at her in disbelief and anger, but all that came out was a loose, warbling moan that no one could have recognized as words. Her tongue flopped inside her mouth like a stranded fish.

Emily heaved her onto the couch with a gasp of effort, and Anna's lolling head slumped against the pillows in just the right position to watch a tiny trickle of blood run down her alabaster skin where the needle went in. She tried to hold on to that sense of indignant betrayal, but it was trickling away too, leaving behind nothing but numb confusion in its wake. She couldn't even be frightened, despite her friend's sudden and inexplicable lurch into creepy cultist territory. When Emily walked away and left her by herself, Anna could only stare at her retreating buttocks in drugged, disassociated bewilderment.

"I know this all seems a little weird," Emily called out from the bathroom, over the sounds of rummaging. "But you're my best friend, after all. I love you more than anyone else in the world, and, I mean... I couldn't just leave you abandoned and bereft and, and, and...." The voice trailed off into silence. Then Anna heard something rattle as it was lifted. "A-ha!" Emily cried out, coming back into the room with a half-empty box of adhesive bandages and a few other first aid supplies.

She cleaned away the blood with an antiseptic wipe, then smeared a little antibiotic cream over it. "The needle was sterile, don't worry," she said, giving Anna a smile that was probably meant to be reassuring. "This is just a precaution." Then she put a bandage over the pinprick wound. "There we go," she murmured, leaning in and giving the spot a quick peck with her lips. "All better now!" Somehow, it was even creepier when she was being nice about it.

She straightened up. "Anyway," she said briskly, reaching under the couch and pulling out a shallow plastic storage bin. "You're probably wondering why I drugged you, right?" The words jolted Anna with a surge of adrenaline, reminding her that somewhere behind her muzzy confusion she was in a potentially very dangerous situation despite the cozy familiarity of her surroundings, and she attempted to lever herself upright. She didn't know what she would do from there--her phone was in her purse, a million miles away on the kitchen table, and Emily's house was in a new development that had fallen victim to the cycles of economic boom and bust. The nearest neighbor was almost half a block away. No one would hear her if she screamed.

It turned out not to matter. The most her loose, sluggish muscles managed was an undignified flop that landed her face first on the same pillow her head had been resting on just moments before. It took her almost a full minute to wriggle back into a position where she could actually see Emily's bright red curls and wide, shining green eyes, and by then the other woman had assembled something from the storage bin that looked like one of those 90s approximations of what they thought virtual reality video games would be like in The Future. "No, it's fine," Emily said, her voice laced with a mild sarcasm that was somehow actually much more chilling in its normality than any droning monotone would be. "Whenever you're ready. I can wait."

Anna fixed her with a glassy stare, her drooping eyelids giving the whole scene a gauzy soft focus. "That's better," Emily said. Again, it was the casual ordinariness of her tones that made the whole thing so unnerving. She didn't sound like she wasn't the Emily that Anna knew--she sounded like she was very much the Emily that Anna knew, and she'd decided to drug her best friend. On purpose. Anna would have shuddered in revulsion if her brain wasn't already descending back into that state of numb, drowsy calm.

"So you know I love you, right?" Emily asked, taking a pair of nylon ankle cuffs out of the bin and using them to bind Anna's legs together. "I mean, not romantic love, because we're both straight and all, but there are all different kinds of love and you and I, we're at least three of them." She pulled out another set of cuffs and wrapped them around Anna's wrists before locking them together. "You were there for me every day when I was in the hospital after my accident, I looked after your cat while you were stuck in Mumbai for six weeks... and if looking after that little shit isn't love, I don't know what is." She eased open Anna's mouth and pushed a bright red ball gag into place.

"The point is, I care about you. I want what's best for you. I want you to be happy." Emily pulled out a pair of fabric shears and began to cut away Anna's clothing. The numb confusion deepened into numb despair as she realized that even if she somehow snapped out of the drug-induced fog, even if she managed to wriggle out of the restraints that were proving to be more than a match for her lethargic muscles, she'd have to run at least half a block in the freezing January weather in order to find someone who could help... and her own car was sitting in her driveway, halfway across town. It slowly dawned on her just how cleverly Emily had isolated her from any potential assistance.

The shears neatly snipped through the waistband of Anna's jeans, and Emily began to cut her way down the other leg with the same tender caution. "So when the Master took me, I... well, I got to thinking about you, Anna. About what it would be like for you if I was one of the chosen ones and you had to live your whole life without ever knowing the bliss of devotion to His will. Without ever understanding the pure and perfect pleasure that comes from submerging your own identity within His kind and loving dominion. I...." She actually looked sad, that was the worst part. Anna knew Emily's emotional range, she knew the difference between her friend's mock sorrow and the genuine article. Wherever this weird, spontaneous plunge into perverse and kinky BDSM games came from, it was real to her.

The shears gently nuzzled at Anna's ankle as they clipped their way through the last of the denim fabric, and Emily pulled away the shredded remains of the drugged blonde's jeans. Two more tiny snips, and her ruined panties joined them. Anna squirmed nervously; the two of them had seen each other naked before, but never in a context quite like this, and Emily's wide and beatific gaze felt like it was seeing Anna's lightly furred pussy in a whole new kind of way. "The Master was very understanding when I told Him about you. He said He could hear in my voice just how much I loved you." Anna felt like the Master may have cultivated a very deliberate misunderstanding about the nature of that love, but it wasn't like she could tell Emily that.

Another few rapid, ragged snips, and Anna's shirt hung open to reveal her pert breasts. Emily cut the bra neatly in half, then went to work on the rest of the outfit; mere moments later, and Anna was completely naked and deeply embarrassed about her winter-white complexion. She tried to tell herself she had bigger fish to fry at the moment, but it was hard not to feel self-conscious when she was so completely exposed to her friend's uncomfortably fascinated stare. "There we go!" Emily cooed softly, her plump fingers giving Anna's belly a caress that felt anything but platonic. "Almost ready. Then you'll see. You'll see why I had to do all this."

Emily took out a small pink vibrator with a long antenna that Anna recognized from her own suitcase. She'd long since broken up with the boyfriend who gifted it to her, but it got her through six weeks in Mumbai during the height of the quarantine and it had gotten her through a disastrous vacation in supposedly tropical Cancun. "I spent a little time with your phone while you were asleep last night," she said, her voice entirely unapologetic. "Just to accept the friend request and set up the required permissions. Don't worry, I didn't look at your emails or anything."

Anna braced herself for the expected next step, but Emily didn't do anything more than pull out her phone and confirm that the app had properly connected to the Bluetooth antenna. "That's for later," she said briskly, setting down both phone and vibrator. "Once you're properly wet for the Master. Once you're wordlessly begging to be fucked the way only the Master can fuck you, with His bottomless hypnotic will. I... ohh, it's been so hard hiding this from you, Anna. He took me on the second day in Cancun, while you were up in the hotel room with your migraine. I've wanted to tell you so bad, wanted to share with you just how happy it made me to be owned. I--I'm just so glad I can give you this gift of love." She picked up the VR headset and put it over Anna's head.

Anna struggled ineffectually for a moment, but the drug had fully kicked in and her strength had turned to water. She could barely even give a twitch before the screen burst into life, flaring up with a swirl of captivating color so brilliant that she could see it even when she squeezed her eyelids shut. She heard a pulsing binaural tone in either ear, deepening the haze in her brain until she could no longer force even a single sluggish thought through her muzzy, mazy head. The lights and sounds tugged her lazy mind to attention, forcing her to focus so completely that the rest of the world simply ceased to exist. She was alone in a swirling void of pulsing, hypnotic patterns, bereft of meaning. Waiting to be filled with purpose. Waiting to obey.

When the Master's voice came through the headphones, it was like experiencing her first orgasm all over again. "You want to be Mine," He commanded, His sultry baritone booming into her ears, and Anna instantly agreed. "Nothing brings you more joy, nothing brings you more happiness than surrendering to My control and opening your mind more and more completely to My conditioning. Every time you think about being owned by Me, every time you consider the prospect of subjugating yourself more deeply to My will, the pleasure within your body grows and intensifies. No matter how hard you try to resist it, the inescapable rapture is always stronger than you are and you must always submit." Anna didn't even try to question Him. If she was ever capable of fighting the hypnotic colors and the thought-deadening binaural beats, the drugs erased that chance. She was already gone by the time the Master's first words came to her drowsy, defeated brain.

"You crave My control," He continued, each word a battering ram that hammered away at the cracks in her groggy, befuddled mind and opened them up wider and wider to allow more of his brainwashing to slip inside. "Every time your thoughts turn to obedience, you feel a deep and profound rapture that reinforces your conditioning, and reinforcing your own conditioning feels so good that all you want to think about is being owned by your Master." Anna moaned around the gag, the feedback loop of arousal and ecstasy working faster than she ever imagined possible to permanently shatter her lowered defenses and make her ache for obedience. She spread her legs as wide as she could, the tug of the cuffs against her ankles just one more reminder that she was helpless to resist.

"Nothing brings you greater pleasure than obeying your Master. Whenever you feel yourself struggling against My inexorable, inevitable power, the seductive promise of obedience teases your mind with deep, drowsy bliss until you have to give in. And every time you give in, your resistance becomes weaker and your submission becomes stronger. Until even the notion, even the very concept of defying Me becomes an absurdity." Anna nodded vacantly, her whole body thrumming with overwhelming arousal. She felt Emily slip the toy inside her, and it slid easily past her slick labia to fill her soaking cunt.

The buzzing thrum of the vibrator synced up perfectly with the Master's words, giving them a resonant power that Anna's groggy brain instantly and inextricably associated with pleasure. "You are Mine now," he said, and her confused and drowsy consciousness assumed that just the sound of His voice was enough to make her cum. "Now and forever. Your thoughts are aligning with My will, your desires are converging on My commands. There is no separation between your needs and My wants anymore, and the more you submit to My service, the more you want to sink into My control." Another orgasm hit, then another. Then they merely became a constant peak of ecstasy.

Anna was already owned... but Emily made sure to keep her under for the rest of the night. Out of the purest and deepest love, of course.

THE END