Margo set Angela’s latest novel across her thighs, the battered preview copy fanned open, and exhaled a long, delighted sigh. The words lingered on her tongue. They were sweet and delicious like an expensive liqueur.

As far as she was concerned, it was Angela’s best work, impossible to put down or stop thinking about for even a moment. Not that she’d ever cared for sword-and-sorcery before. The genre always seemed like a thin excuse for boys to swing swords at each other and to get drunk on violence and self-importance before retiring to the tavern to get drunk all night.

Angela, though, had a knack for making the unreal seem believable and more than a little dangerous. Her prose was a slow-acting poison, worming its way under the skin, and by the end of the first chapter, Margo had been undone. Three hundred and sixty-four pages later, she was only starting to savor the aftereffects, a buzzing in her brain, as if a swarm of invisible bees had settled there and was waiting for a cue to sting.

She rocked forward on the futon, running her fingers over the dog-eared page, wondering if she should start it again immediately or let the memory ferment for a while. The former won out, if only by a hair. She’d reached for her phone before she even realized it.

Angela picked up on the second ring. “Margo. You can’t be finished already,” she laughed.

“I am, and I hate you for it,” Margo said. “Please tell me you’re working on the next one. Lie if you have to.”

“Oh, I never lie,” Angela replied, her voice sultry even over the phone. “But yes, I’m already a few chapters into the sequel. Did you enjoy it that much?”

“Enjoy? It’s the best thing I’ve read in ages. Except for the ending, which was pure torture. You’re a monster for leaving it there.”

“Cliffhangers build character,” Angela purred. “And anticipation. I’m glad you liked it, Margo. You’re my ideal beta reader, you know?”

Margo blushed, too pleased to protest. “I can’t stop thinking about Chapter Thirteen. That’s my favorite part.”

“Is it?” Angela’s tone shifted, becoming softer and more coaxing. “People keep telling me that. What drew you to it?”

“All of it. The build-up, the mood, and the… You know… the scene.”

“You mean, the sex?”

“God, yes. Not that I want to sound like a pervert, but...”

“You’re not. That’s what it’s for.” Angela paused for a moment. “What did you picture when you read it?”

Margo hesitated, then admitted, “I think I wanted it to be me. That’s embarrassing, isn’t it?”

Angela chuckled. “Not at all. I wrote it for people like you. People who want to lose themselves, even if it’s only for a few pages. Was it convincing?”

“Ridiculously so. It was like I stopped being myself for a minute. Like I went all floaty, you know?”

Angela’s laughter was lower now, and a little more intimate. “Then I got what I wanted. Chapter Thirteen is where everything changes. Before that, you’re just watching. After that, you’re in it, and there’s no way out, is there?”

Margo nodded, goosebumps spreading across her arms. She remembered the chapter so well that it was as if she’d already re-read it a dozen times. The protagonist, Princess Lianne, had been living her best life until she found the enchanted dagger, which led in a straight, perilous line to the dark sorceress Zeniah. Their first real encounter turned into a fever dream of control and surrender - hypnotic, humiliating, and hot as fuck! Lianne’s will had melted away in Zeniah’s presence, her thoughts growing less and less her own, until she accepted her new role as a helpless, eager possession. The sex was only the beginning.

“I love how Lianne just… gives in,” Margo said. “It’s like she wants it, but she doesn’t understand why.”

“She doesn’t need to understand,” Angela replied. “Nobody does. Sometimes, you just have to let go, and everything becomes so much better. Like falling asleep and waking up in someone else’s skin.”

“I wish I could do that,” Margo blurted.

“Do what?”

“Just let go. Be someone’s possession for a while. Not have to think so much.”

Another pause, this one longer. Angela smiled in silence.

“You can, you know. It’s not hard if you trust the person,” Angela said. “Do you trust me, Margo?”

The words came out before Margo could second-guess them: “Yes. God, yes!”

“Good. Close your eyes for a second.”

Margo, feeling a little foolish but also expectant, did as she was told. It was a simple thing, closing her eyes on command, but with Angela’s voice in her ear, it was as momentous as stepping through a secret door. For a second, Margo’s living room faded, and all that was left was Angela, her words as tactile and enveloping as a silk blindfold.

“Imagine you’re in Greyloft,” Angela said, and Margo did: the city rising in her mind’s eye, all storm-washed rooftops and labyrinthine alleys swallowed by fog. “The world is cold and gray, but you are warm.” The words made Margo shiver. She saw herself - not quite herself, but filtered through Lianne’s lithe and desperate frame - walking alone down a corridor lined with slick, sweating stone. Even in her imagination, the chill seeped through her borrowed boots, but it didn’t matter. The warmth, Angela promised, was inside her.
“You’re walking down a long corridor now. Imagine it for me.”

The scene clarified, took on color and weight. Margo imagined her footsteps echoing on the flagstones, the sound muffled by the thick Greyloft mist that swirled around her and hung from the ceiling in clammy drifts. Her pulse was quick and flighty. More than anything, she sensed the presence behind her: relentless, inevitable, never quite closing the distance yet also never letting her out of its orbit. If she’d been reading, she would have called it a metaphor for fate or compulsion, but now it was just the electrifying tension of being watched, stalked, wanted.

“You know it’s Zeniah. She’s come for you.”

Angela said it like a spell, and something inside Margo fluttered in response. She pictured the dark sorceress - super tall, midnight-haired, eyes like twin bottomless wells - and the way she’d seemed to stride out of the story straight into Margo’s private reveries. The fantasy wasn’t just about sex, or at least not in the way Margo had always understood it; it was about being known so completely that resistance became irrelevant; it spoke of submitting to a will so strong that all inner protest collapsed into endless gratitude.
Margo’s heart thudded. She pictured herself in Lianne’s shoes, no longer a reader on the outside looking in, but a heroine trembling with anticipation. She tried to walk faster, but the corridor stretched and folded around her, each step plunging her deeper into this fantastical dream.

“She’s right behind you, and you can’t run,” Angela declared. “You remember what happens next, don’t you?”

Margo felt herself nodding, though she hadn’t meant to. The scene replayed itself from muscle memory: Zeniah closing in, the sudden drop in temperature, the hand snaking out to seize Lianne (her) by the wrist. In the book, the moment had been drawn out over three pages, and she remembered every detail: Lianne’s frantic gasps, Zeniah’s evil smile, the slow, deliberate way she cornered her prey until there was nowhere left to go.

In her mind’s eye, Zeniah pressed her up against the cold stone wall. There was no violence, only inevitability; nothing sharp or sudden, just the absolute certainty of surrender. She ran her gloved fingers over Lianne’s (her) jaw, thumb brushing the corner of her mouth, and Margo licked her lips.

“Now you’re just like the Princess,” Angela said, the words warm and thick as honey. “You’re losing your thoughts. You’re letting go. It’s so easy to let me take them from you.”
The effect was immediate and disorienting. Margo’s scalp prickled, and her limbs became heavy. In the blink of an eye, she was unsure where fiction ended and reality began. Angela’s voice was the through line, the anchor keeping her from tumbling too far into the dark, but even that, she realized, was submission, a desire to be led wherever Angela wanted to take her.

“I can,” Margo whispered, though the word almost didn’t reach her lips. The skin at the back of her neck tingled as if a pair of invisible hands were lacing themselves into her hair and tipping her head back.

“Good,” Angela said. “You’re doing so well. Just let it happen.”

Margo’s mind flickered in and out of the fantasy, sometimes watching from above, sometimes pulled under. The corridor became a dungeon, the stones slick with condensation, and the air tinged with woodsmoke and resin. Zeniah’s shadow loomed over her, a silhouette stitched from the deepest blue. Her grip was absolute but gentle, a paradox Margo had never experienced outside of literature or wet dreams.

Zeniah leaned in and whispered something in Lianne’s ear, too soft to hear. Margo strained to catch the words, but the language kept slipping out of her grasp, replaced by sensation: the press of Zeniah’s body, the heat radiating through the cold, the way her touch seemed to erase Margo’s boundaries until she began to dissolve. The thrill of it made her knees buckle, even though she was only sitting on a futon in a threadbare T-shirt and blue sweatpants, clutching her phone like a lifeline.

Angela’s voice shifted again and became firmer. “You want to resist her, but you can’t. You don’t even try. You’re grateful. You want to belong to her, don’t you?”

Margo’s throat was dry. She nodded again, cheeks burning, and on the other end of the line, Angela made a pleased, approving sound.

“That’s it. Let her in. Let me in.”

For a moment, Margo lost all sense of time and place. The world contracted to a pinpoint: Zeniah’s face so close, her breath cool on Margo’s cheek, her gloved hand covering Margo’s mouth. And behind that, the sure, invisible presence of Angela, orchestrating her demise.

The author kept talking, the words unraveling in a slow, hypnotic rhythm. “You’ve never been happier. You don’t need to think, you just need to obey. It’s wonderful to let someone else decide everything for you.”

Margo nodded, her entire body vibrating with a strange, unfamiliar hunger. The part of her that was still awake and critical wanted to laugh, or protest, or at least analyze what was happening, but the rest of her craved nothing more than to be swept along by Angela’s mesmeric incantation.

Zeniah’s hands slid down her arms, pinning her wrists to the wall. Margo imagined the gloves, the faint crackle of static as leather rubbed against her skin. She found herself whispering, “Yes,” over and over, not sure if it was in her own voice or Lianne’s.

Angela’s tone softened again, coaxing and playful. “You’re not resisting at all, are you?”

“No,” Margo whispered.

“You want this,” Angela said. “You want to be hers.”

Margo’s reply was immediate, involuntary: “Yes. I do.”

Zeniah’s lips brushed her ear, and Margo shivered so hard she almost dropped the phone. The story was still happening, but now she was inside it, following a new script that Angela was writing in real time. Margo tried to remember if she’d ever felt so alive, so out of control and at peace with it, but her mind kept circling back to the warmth in her chest and the liquid heat pooling lower down. God, she was so fucking horny!

Angela allowed the silence to linger, only the faint hiss of the phone line connecting them over the miles. Margo could hear her own breathing - fast, uneven, and loud - but Angela seemed to savor it.

“Remember this sensation,” Angela said. “Let it grow inside you, even after you wake up. Can you do that for me?”

Margo swallowed, the sensation so real she had to remind herself it was just a story. “I’ll try.”

“Don’t try,” Angela said. “Just let it happen. Are you ready to come back now?”

Margo hesitated, not wanting to leave the dreamy, suspended state, but also wanting to please Angela. “Yes,” she whispered. 

“Excellent. Now, in a second, you’re going to wake up, and you’ll still feel it, all that surrender, all that need.” Angela’s voice made a slow circle around the word. “You love it, don’t you?”

Margo was dizzy with it. The fantasy, the voice, the way Angela played with her emotions from the inside out. “Yes. I do.”

“Good. Don’t fight it. Think about it every time you see my name, pick up the book, or remember Chapter Thirteen. Let it grow stronger every day. You will obey.”

The words slid into her, comfortable and cool like a hypodermic needle. “Yes, Angela.”

“Good girl.”

Margo’s mind turned to syrup. Her hand drifted to her lap, finding purchase between her legs, almost of its own accord. She could hear Angela’s voice, but it was as if it was coming from inside her head now. The sexy scene replayed, again and again: Zeniah’s hands, the hypnotic stare, the moment of collapse. She wanted to be emptied.

“Are you still there?” Angela prompted.

“I… Yeah. I zoned out for a second.”

Angela giggled. “I thought you might. That’s my favorite part - the aftertaste. When you’re not sure if you’re you, or the character, or somewhere in between.”

Margo shivered. “It’s intense,” she murmured. “I don’t know if I’m making sense, but… I think I’m still under the spell.”

Angela’s voice dropped to a murmur. “You are. And that’s how I want you. Deeper and deeper, Margo. The dark sorceress only wants good girls to serve her. She deserves nothing less. Don’t I deserve the same?”

“Yes, Angela.”

“Will you always be my good girl and do as you’re told?”

“Y-yes.”

“Then sink again into the wonderful ecstasy of submission. You love Chapter Thirteen because it tells you who and what you are. You can’t resist being mine to command any more than Lianne can fight her training. You are my slave, Margo, and slaves obey. Deeper still, so I can program you in all the ways you will serve me from now on.”

The words washed over Margo like a tide, slow and irresistible, eroding her doubts grain by grain until nothing remained but the smooth, glassy surface of obedience. She was both the reader and the character, the author and the clay, helpless to stop the way Angela’s voice rewrote her, one syllable at a time. The more Angela spoke, the less Margo resisted; every command melting her thoughts into a single, overwhelming urge: to surrender, to please, to serve.

Her eyes rolled back, eyelids fluttering, and she slumped further into the futon’s battered embrace. The hand holding her phone slipped to her collarbone, while the other moved of its own volition, sliding beneath the waistband of her sweatpants, fingers trembling. It was as if Angela had taken up residence in Margo’s nervous system, flicking switches, rerouting priorities, amplifying every pulse of pleasure and every flicker of need. The air in the apartment went thin, the walls receding, and the Greyloft dungeon unfurled in front of her with vivid, predatory clarity: the cold, wet stone, the ring of iron at her wrist, the memory of leather gloves closing around her throat…

Angela’s voice deepened, smoothing out into a narcotic, liquid murmur. “This is how you want to live, Margo. You want to live only to serve. You want to be remade into the thing you were always meant to be. You crave being owned, used, and converted into something beautiful and shameless. You will think about this every day. It will shape your decisions. It will haunt your dreams. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

Yes, her mind screamed, yes, yes, yes, but the sound that came out of her was a low, animalistic whimper. She couldn’t have fought it even if she’d tried. Her hand had become Angela’s hand, doing Angela’s will, and she was only a passenger, a raw bundle of receptors and nerves. The word “slave” settled on her tongue, heavy and cool as metal.

Angela’s breath caught the microphone, a faint hiss somehow still loud enough to drown everything else. “You’re getting so wet for me, aren’t you? You love this. The more I talk, the more the pleasure builds within you, and you can’t stop it. The more you obey, the more you need to obey. It’s a loop, and I’m tightening it around your throat. How perfect is that, Margo?”

She wanted to reply, but her throat had seized. The only thing she could do was gasp, arching into the pressure of her own hand as if begging for permission. The story and the voice and her own body were indistinguishable; every boundary had collapsed under the weight of Angela’s spell. She was Lianne, the princess, the supplicant, and the slave, and all of her reflections were drowning in ecstasy.

“This is your reality now,” Angela whispered. “You’ll think about this every time you see my name. Every time you touch yourself, you’ll replay these words. You’ll crave it until you can’t help but beg me to control you again.”

The words struck Margo like a succession of blows, each sweeter than the last. She went under once more, tumbling through the layers of the fantasy as if falling through water. Time stretched and distorted; she was both in motion and stationary, both the hunter and the prey. The cold from the dungeon wall seeped into her back, the imagined iron of the shackles grounding her until her hands burned, and her body succumbed to the need to give in without remorse.

“Yes,” she said, the word a hoarse moan. “Yes, Angela—please—”

Angela’s laugh was intoxicating. “You’re going to finish for me now. Because I said so. That’s what happens to good girls and slaves, isn’t it, Margo? They obey. They come when they’re told.”

The command slammed into her, a surge of white light behind her eyes, a shudder that started in her knees and rocketed straight up her spine. Her hand ground down, mindless and perfect, and every remaining scrap of her will dissolved in the rush. The voice in her ear, the utter powerlessness, the knowledge that she was being watched, even from miles away, by the only person who understood her - all of it converged in a single, obliterating instant.

It hit her like a train, sudden and overwhelming, a raw convulsion that tore through Margo’s body with no warning, no buildup, and no chance to brace against it. Her hand was slippery and frantic, the heel of her palm pressed so hard she thought she might bruise herself, but she couldn’t stop, not for a second, not with Angela’s voice pouring honeyed commands into her ear. Every word was a trigger, each syllable a tiny electrical spark sent straight to her nerves, and she rode the wave in utter despair, every muscle locked and straining.

There was a deep, shuddering recognition in the sensation - that this was not her will, not her pleasure, not her identity any longer. It was a borrowed desire, authored by Angela and forced on her as absolutely as Zeniah’s magical shackles. Margo moaned louder than ever before, a noise of pure surrender so alien and beautiful it terrified her. She tried to choke it back, but Angela had already programmed that out of her. She was a conduit now, a vessel for the writer’s will, and she came hard enough to see stars, and the entire universe exploding around them.

She shook, her knees drawing up toward her chest, her entire body folding into itself as if trying to make less surface area for the pleasure to land on. She wanted to resist, to offer a token struggle, but it was so hot, so sweet and addictive that all resistance evaporated mid-thought. Her mind fragmented, breaking into a thousand slivers of sensation: the memory of Angela’s breath on her ear, the ghostly touch of Zeniah’s gloves, the echo of her own voice promising undying obedience. It was as if her orgasm was being externally administered, the detonation synced to Angela’s words, all her autonomy overwritten.

Her throat ached with the effort of voicing her need, but she managed, “Oh God, Angela, please...” before the second wave hit, rolling through her in quick aftershocks, each one smaller but sharper, embedding the command deeper. She was being carved out, hollowed, and refilled with something new and impossible to deny. It was the submission, she realized, the act of giving herself over that was the genuine pleasure; the orgasm was just a physical symptom, a side effect of the rewriting taking place.

By the time it subsided, she was a limp, panting wreck, her muscles twitching and her skin buzzing as if she’d been dipped in ice water. The phone slipped from her slack fingers and landed on the futon, Angela’s soft laughter still audible, and in control. Margo didn’t know if she’d ever been so thoroughly, humiliatingly conquered, and she wanted nothing more than to experience it again.

Her mind became cottony and diffuse, the lines between fantasy and reality blurring into a single, seamless field of color and sound. The only things that remained were Angela’s voice, the cadence of command, and the exquisite certainty that she would do anything to obey her Mistress.

“You’re such a good slave, Margo,” Angela whispered, gentle now. “You’re floating, happy, content. Let yourself rest in it. We’ll talk again soon.”

Angela closed the call with a deliberate, lingering touch, savoring the small, hollow pop as the connection dissolved into digital ether. She leaned back in her battered Aeron chair, the blue glow of her monitor painting her skin in the exact shades of a night she had no intention of sleeping through. On her desk, an old mug of coffee had gone cold, but she kept it nearby, a talisman of her old life as a teacher before she’d learned to weaponise her words. There was a thrill to this, a charge that left her hands trembling on the keyboard, not from caffeine but from the aftershock of absolute control.

She toggled over to the Discord server where her small, carefully curated coven of beta readers waited for updates and private attention. The same digital flock who worshiped her writing and, increasingly, her. Angela had always chosen her readers for hunger, not taste - a hunger for stories, for the next chapter, and the chance to be noticed by her. They would devour anything she produced: updates, deleted scenes, even the barest outline of a plot twist. 

But Margo was different. She’d recognized it in the first DM, something brittle and rare in the way Margo confessed her devotion. The desperate way she inhaled each new chapter, the feverish speculation in her late-night emails, the little hints of loneliness and self-loathing that bled through the lines. A girl like that didn’t just want a story - she wanted to be rewritten, right down to the bone.

Angela scrolled through Margo’s recent messages, rereading the last flurry of responses, picking them apart for evidence of her own effect. She relished the way Margo’s grammar collapsed as the session deepened. The typos, the sudden flood of exclamation marks, and the way her voice turned childlike and pleading by the end. It was all so textbook and yet so much sweeter because Margo didn’t realize she had already been mindfucked. Angela could still hear the echo of her words in the silence: You are my slave, Margo, and slaves obey. 

She toyed with the idea of calling Margo back, just to see if she could deepen the trance, but decided against it. Best to let the new programming bubble up inside her; she wanted to see what Margo would do with all that need and no immediate outlet. Would she write frantic, embarrassing emails in the morning, or would she try to fight it, pretending nothing had changed? Both options were delicious.

Angela opened a new document and began outlining the next chapter. She set the scene: a princess, broken and blushing, forced to kneel before her captor in ceremonial chains. There were always chains, always collars, always a little knife of shame hidden inside the pleasure. She wrote without shame, pausing every so often to imagine Margo’s reaction to each new escalation. She pictured Margo on the futon, still trembling, the line between fantasy and reality scrubbed away by the need imprinted on her. It wouldn’t be long until she begged for another call. Angela would make her wait.

In the meantime, she queued up a playlist of the softest, most seductive synth she could find, let it flood the little apartment, and prowled the forums for new victims. There were always more women out there, eager to fall into the trap of becoming her beta readers. But Margo was the best, and Angela would keep her around until she broke for good.
She set an alarm for dawn and let herself drift on the undertow of her power, content and buzzing, a queen in her private digital world. At last, she dragged a blanket over her legs, set her phone to sleep mode, and closed her eyes, already dreaming of the next command to issue.

Life was good when she was in charge, and Angela wouldn’t have it any other way.

The End