Mistress Susan leaned forward, her hands folded neatly atop the white linen, her gaze quietly consuming Meredith’s startled, pliant face. All around them, the world continued its polite, oblivious ballet: other conference attendees maneuvered between tables, quiet laughter fluttered in the air, and forks rang a staccato against plates. But for Meredith, all that mattered now was the words about to emerge from Mistress Susan’s lips.

“Meredith,” Mistress Susan, her tone soft, almost whispering, as if she were not just addressing her but confiding in her, folding her into the inner sanctum of some clandestine order. “Until the end of the day, everything I say is the truth. You cannot doubt me, not even for a second. When I speak, you believe me. It’s impossible for you not to.”

There was no hint of menace in her declaration. There was no need. Mistress Susan was beyond menace, beyond threat. Her authority was absolute and ambient and so natural that the world itself rearranged to accommodate her. If a glass were to fall, it would land upright. If the sun set, it was because she permitted it.

“You trust me because you always have. In fact, we’ve done this before, you and I, many, many times. Each time you hear my voice, you remember a little more, and it feels so good, doesn’t it? So safe, so inevitable.”

Meredith nodded. She could picture her own brain, suddenly so clean and hollow, as if Mistress Susan’s words had sluiced it out and left behind nothing more than the glistening echo of obedience.

Somewhere in the background, Ava murmured an appreciative “mmm” around her own forkful, as if endorsing the seduction.

“This already happened. This will always happen. Being entranced by me is what you live for, my dear,” the hypnodomme continued.

Meredith’s mind struggled to keep pace. Her sense of time warped and buckled. She tried to recall whether she had, in fact, been hypnotized by Mistress Susan before today’s demonstration, but the effort was like trying to reconstruct a dream after the sun had risen.

Instead, new memories flickered into being - hypnotic lunches beneath trembling patio umbrellas, quiet lectures in the corner of a bookshop, the soft scrape of a wooden spoon across the back of her hand as Susan taught her the proper way to hold a utensil. These scenes replaced and rewrote what had been there before, and Meredith had no defense against them. The past itself became a script, revised and annotated by the woman sitting across the table.

It was not a new sensation, this drowning in certainty, but never before had it arrived so swiftly and so thoroughly, and she loved that. She loved everything about Mistress Susan. 

“That’s right, sweetheart,” Mistress Susan intoned, her hand returning to rest on the crook of Meredith’s elbow, reassuring and possessive. “You’re so good at this because I’ve trained you so well. That’s why you slip under so quickly. That’s why you melt for me.”

Each word was a drop of honey on the raw, trembling tissue of Meredith’s new reality. With every statement, she felt her resistance slough off in flakes, leaving her exposed, receptive, desperate for the next truth to be revealed. The food on her plate congealed and wilted, forgotten. The only hunger now was in her chest, where the need to please Mistress Susan’s every whim gnawed and gnawed.

“From this moment on, you’ll remember that I’ve always been a part of you,” Susan continued. “Whenever you see me, or even think of me, you’ll feel that soft, warm place in your head open up. You’ll crave this feeling, the way it quiets everything else. You’ll do anything to feel it again.”

Meredith’s head bobbed, slipping deeper into trance. All doubts slipped through her fingers and became like mist. All that remained was the smooth, frictionless agreement with Mistress Susan’s every syllable.

The sensation was like a tide, ebbing and flowing, but always returning with greater strength. Meredith’s entire self was a warm, receptive sponge, soaking up the truths being fed to her. She wanted to stand, to kneel, to offer up some physical sign of her acquiescence, but even the urge to move seemed to have been replaced by a compulsion to listen, to absorb, and to internalize. There was no greater feeling in the world.

“You’re my subject,” said Mistress Susan, her voice a gentle caress. “You’ve been mine for as long as you can remember. And it feels so natural, so right, to obey me. That’s the only thing you ever want, deep down: to be told what to do, and to do it perfectly.”

Meredith’s mouth fell open in utter awe. She barely noticed as Mistress Susan dabbed her napkin and took a sip of water as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. For Meredith, however, the opposite couldn’t be further from the truth. Her personality, her sense of agency, had been taken apart and reassembled, the edges filed smooth by obsessive care.

Meredith’s mind spun with a heady, intoxicating rush. It was as if every nerve ending in her body had been washed clean and made new, hypersensitized to the smallest ripple of sensation. She was dizzy and elated and relieved, all at once. The tension that had always lived in her ribcage, the anxiety of being the one in charge, the weight of orchestrating every little detail of every event, had vanished. In its place was the cool, heady pleasure of knowing she would never have to think for herself again, not really. She would obey, and the world would be simple, orderly, and good.

Each command was a benediction, a release from the thousand petty tyrannies of her own indecision. There was nothing but peace now, a sweet buoyancy that left her trembling with gratitude. She had been unburdened.

The sensation was so good it bordered on pain. Her scalp tingled. Her eyes watered. If she had been asked, at that moment, to kneel under the table and kiss Mistress Susan’s feet, she would have done it, right then and there, in front of every assembled guest, and she would have felt nothing but pride to be seen in such perfect, public surrender. She yearned for another command, another chance to demonstrate the ease with which she could let go, to show everyone how deeply she belonged to this new order.

But even the hunger for instruction was a comfort, because it was simple and true. It did not require analysis, doubt, or memory. All she had to do was wait and trust that Mistress Susan would provide for her every need. Meredith closed her eyes for a split second and let herself drift, savoring the pure, crystalline clarity of a mind finally emptied of extraneous thought. She pictured herself as a vessel, gleaming and hollow, waiting to be filled with more of Susan’s voice, and the anticipation was almost as good as the fulfillment.

Mistress Susan watched her with the affectionate amusement of a parent observing a particularly clever toddler take its first tottering steps. The affection in her gaze was unmistakable, and Meredith basked in it, letting it soak into her bones.

“You look like you have something to say, pet,” Mistress Susan noted. “Go ahead, I want to hear it.”

And, just as she had been commanded, Meredith’s lips parted and her voice emerged, shaped and smoothed by Mistress Susan’s will.

“I’ve always been yours,” she declared.