They systematically raided the filing cabinet. Every document was inspected at speed by experienced eyes, looking for just enough information to say it might be relevant.

Anything relevant was tossed onto the desk. Anything irrelevant was dropped to the floor; it wasn’t as if their break-in could be concealed anyway.

“Who do you think that was?” Chen asked absently as she searched. “Before they went under, I mean.”

“No idea,” Gigi returned. And then, after a pause and a moment to consider, she said, “An amateur, definitely. Didn’t have the reflexes of a pro, but had a good response time, so this isn’t her responses overridden with a need for a command to act or anything like that. Fast and aggressive, too.”

“That matches my thinking,” Chen agreed.

“Might be a super,” Gigi mused. “Might just be very good. I’m thinking they were either a hero, security, or that mercenary/criminal grey area.”

“It’s a lead if we need it,” Chen said. “Not until we’ve tried doing it sensibly, though.” She flourished a handful of pages. “What I’ve got here is a few invoices for businesses for custom items. Super traceable. Which is great. If it’s real.”

Gigi nodded. Everything about the Capitol Ghost was misdirection, it seemed. This could be too.

“I have some stuff that seems… well, a little less deliberately placed,” she said. “Might mean that all of it’s legitimate. Might not. But…” She fanned out several sheets with hasty handwritten scrawl over the desk. Chen glanced over it, and her brow furrowed.

“I can’t read this.”

“It’s an alphabetic shorthand,” Gigi said. “I infiltrated a place through the secretarial pool once, before the whole Walters thing. Had to learn this well enough to minute meetings. She looked up at the other woman, grinning. “Enough people have your reaction that I’d almost be tempted to use it as code. Only problem is, anyone who recognises it can read it easy.”

“Okay. What does it say?”

“Mostly it says a bunch of stuff about hypnotic technique.” Gigi smiles. “It says it over and over again. And I’m thinking these are different people taking it down each time. You see here, where around the third paragraph the letters start to get wider and rounder?”

“And a couple paragraphs later the is lose their dots and the ts lose their crossbars,” Chen agreed, skimming over it. “So presumably, whoever did this was hypnotising the people taking their dictation.” She looked at the last paragraphs, seeing the same motif repeating over and over; three groups of two letters.

She had a vision of a woman in a dingy office, eyes glazed, jaw slack, lips shaping the words of a mantra as she scribbled them down over and over, too far gone to resist, to do anything…

“Who the hell uses written shorthand nowadays, though?” Chen asked.

“Virtually nobody,” Gigi agreed. “It lasted through the dictaphone era only because some bosses were stingy enough not to buy a dictaphone. Nowadays your phone can handle it for you. Plus, though, this paper’s old. It’s not gone yellow because it’s been hidden away, but it’s dried out even more. You can feel the difference in texture.”

Chen nodded. “Hard to believe someone this showy has been doing this a long time without us knowing about it.”

“Right. I’m thinking this might be where he picked up his tactics from.” Gigi put her palm flat on the papers and slid them across to Chen. “Something for someone with a big team to run down,” she said. “Whoever he got this from isn’t going to be connected to our problem, so odds are good your team can work with this. But if we can find out where he got his ideas, we might figure out who he is.”

“And then we catch him napping.” Chen took the paperwork. “It’s got to be worth a try.”

*

Evelyn drew in a deep breath. “Howard, I know, but-“

“It can’t be done, Evelyn,” the man on the other end of the phone said. “It just can’t be done. I’m not unsympathetic to your urgency, but I’ve put everything in motion now. I just…” He trailed off.

Evelyn knew Howard well, knew his habits. That pause was something he deployed often when he was telling somebody no, but only if the answer was actually maybe. Or more often, if the answer was make it worth my while. He didn’t like to name his price up front; often he hadn’t decided what his price was, but even when he knew, he’d hold it back.

A sudden silence when he’d been running roughshod over someone was an invitation to talk, but it carried no other information. The listener rushed to fill the void, and they might say anything, might offer anything.

Even knowing this, Evelyn had historically fallen for it over and over again, and she opened her mouth this time ready to do it again before something in her head interrupted her. She couldn’t imagine that the Mistress would allow herself to be dominated like this, except by the Doctor. And this man was neither the Master nor her husband.

“What do you need, Howard?” she asked sweetly.

It’s possible for a silence to have an atmosphere it carries with it. A texture of quiet. And the texture of this one had changed; she didn’t think Howard was happy about her changing the script. Hopefully he’d at least respect the honesty, she thought, suddenly very aware that she still needed him to make this deal.

“Well,” he said in the end, “I’d need three things. I have some line-items that need adding to a budget without coming from me; I need something that will convince Sebastian that we’re not crazy to about-face on this; and Worthington is genuinely motivated on this subject. His businesses make a lot more money if he’s bargaining with individual locations, not federally.”

Evelyn’s lips had set into a wry smile. She’d expected the issue with Worthington; she and her husband had found themselves cutting a private deal to reduce the cost of rebuilding several bridges back home. He was far from the only person pushing against federal infrastructure support, but he was the closest ally Howard had in that circle. “Those can be arranged,” she said. “I didn’t realise Sebastian was involved.”

“Sebastian’s the only reason I’m doing any of this,” Howard told her. “Ah - don’t pass that on to your dear husband, please.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Evelyn cooed, filing the information away to present to him at the earliest opportunity. The only person she owed greater submission to than her husband was the Doctor.

“Good, because I know he thinks he talked me into it. Sebastian isn’t personally invested, I don’t think. But his biggest donors are.”

It was strange to Evelyn now that she used to think of this environment as natural, this web of tangled puppet strings, everyone being moved one way or another. It made much more sense, her programming told her, for everyone to be slaved to the will of one other.

“And so what does he want?”

“Well, he’ll not be too upset to revoke his support. But he will want to understand why.”

“That’s… actually, that’s a pattern with him, isn’t it?”

On the other end of the line, Howard chuckled. “You’ve noticed. Good.

“Yes, Sebastian’s big need is knowledge, I think. I’ve never asked him-“

“You wouldn’t dare, Howard.” Evelyn let her amusement leak into her voice, knowing that he wouldn’t disagree.

He laughed, properly laughed, and she relaxed. He was almost entirely on her side now; the deal was all but struck.

Not that the rest of this conversation would be an easy one. On the other hand…

Well, considering that Sebastian had more women on his staff than anyone else on the Hill, Evelyn knew the women who were comfortable talking directly were few in number. And she wasn’t one of them - getting Howard to fill him in might be a side benefit.

“Alright,” she said, finally. “You know Penelope Rutherford, of course.”

“Of course. The most mercenary person in D.C. to most of us. And a close personal friend to you.”

“Absolutely. Which often means she drives the hardest bargains with me. But this isn’t about that. It all started a few days ago, at my husband’s gala…”

*

Kelly sat quietly on the sofa and didn’t move. Her owner was busy groping the new slave Penny had brought him. Kelly had been told to sit, and so she sat, but now nothing was happening and there were no orders for her to obey, and so instead she sat still and unspeaking, alone in a room filled with lust.

She was alone with her thoughts. That hadn’t happened to her all that often, it suddenly occurred to her, since she’d shown her owner the spell notes and he’d promptly cast it on her. Even when she’d been alone, like when her owner had gone off to cast it on his best friend. Like happened when he’d sent her flying cross-country to find the cheapest possible rooms in D.C. for this plan.

It had always been her thoughts and the rules the spell bound around them. Even when she had no command to obey, there was always something hanging there, seeming almost like a thought, but from outside.

They outranked her thoughts, and could take over her head at any moment. In the beginning they had taken over whenever she thought about disobeying her owner, and she was sure she’d never completed a thought about disobedience; they had all become, in time, just agreement with her owner’s wishes.

And whenever she tried to think of her owner in any other way, they were there before she could do so. He was always and forever her owner in her mind. His name, his old relationship with her, this was information only her subconscious had access to, if she had any access at all.

Over months Kelly had been taught by this process to think less and less, except when the orders she was given were complex.

The most emotional thoughts had been the last to leave. Even now, she was still occasionally frustrated with her owner, with the fact of not being free.

But she never got to think along those lines for long before these other presences in her mind, the rules, overwrote the thoughts, and she was instead thinking about how right it was to have an owner, how property was a better thing to be. How right and natural it was to be given commands and to obey them without question.

For some time, these rules had seemed better, although they carried a new frustration with them once he took his first other female slave. When he was using the new girl, Penny, instead of her, Kelly felt a quiet emptiness open up inside her.

It was an absence of her owner’s attention, she eventually decided; the need to be doing something in his service she’d found had gradually taken over, and then sometimes she was presented with him choosing someone else for the same service. Not jealousy, but just… emptiness.

She knew it had made her come across badly to Penny, when they first met, because Penny had told her, after a while, during a quiet moment when their owner wasn’t present. She hoped it wasn’t coming across as badly to the new slave, although the way she and her owner were kissing didn’t suggest the new slave was distracted by it, at least.

Honestly, neither Shannon nor her owner seemed to be paying Kelly any attention, which might be why the emptiness was filling her again - although, Kelly found herself thinking, usually by this point the rules had replaced her thoughts. She didn’t often get to do so much analysis of the way Roy behaved.

There was therefore no way for her to tell whether or not Roy was getting more power-hungry, caring less about his property, or…

…or…

Kelly sat quietly on the sofa and tried to go back over her thoughts. She’d been probing the way the spell had affected her thought processes and the way it interrupted them, overrode them in order to keep her in obedient service to Roy, prevented her from criticising his behaviour, prevented her from even thinking consciously about Roy’s identity or him having been a close, close friend before he betrayed her by casting the spell on her.

Roy.

Not her owner. Roy.

Did that mean anything else had changed? She had been told to sit just where she was…

Her eyes flicked back to Roy and Shannon, and definitely their attention was still elsewhere. Roy’s eyes were half-closed as Shannon’s hands worked his shaft, his head was turned away; Kelly couldn’t imagine he was listening too clearly.

She lifted one foot from where it rested and set it down elsewhere. Bunched her hand into a fist and placed it against the sofa seat. Took hold of the armrest with her other hand.

Nothing had interrupted her thoughts to stop her. She stood, tentatively, then smiled broadly when she realised nothing was going to stop her.

After what she figured must have been a good half year of slavery, she slipped out of the living room unnoticed, then bolted for the door.

*

The suitcase was open on her bed. For the tenth or eleventh time since she’d carried it back home, eyes wide, more than slightly worried, Darby opened the concealed compartment and ran her fingers over the logo on the costume within.

Then she returned to the chair in the corner of the room and sat down, staring at it. It had been so unexpected that it still didn’t seem entirely real; she couldn’t believe she’d stumbled on a secret identity in the way she had.

And yet, what else would explain it? Who would carry a cosplay outfit in a secret compartment, and do so while investigating something strange outside their home town?

There was a utility belt that Darby hadn’t been able to bring herself to investigate. Surely it would be booby trapped somehow.

*

One of the women of his office was licking his cock clean while he took the call from his friend. He listened, patiently, as Howard explained, piece by piece, the story of Penelope Rutherford, and how it tied into Evelyn Raines’ willingness to completely abandon a deal she’d helped to build.

“Fascinating,” he said in the end. “You could have offered me a dozen guesses and I wouldn’t have come up with this.”

“No, me either.”

“You believe the abduction story?”

He had the satisfaction of hearing genuine shock in Howard’s voice. “What else would explain it? This isn’t a strategy you drop on a bill like this one. If you’ve got to try it at all, it’s a once in a lifetime play.”

“That’s assuming it was her strategy,” he pointed out.

“Well, of course it would be. I mean, she’s in control of the situation, or she was abducted, those are the options, right?”

“Perhaps not,” he said, but didn’t elaborate. “I don’t work much with Ms Rutherford, but my impression of her is that her word is everything.”

“Right. That’s why she keeps getting clients going back to her.”

He nodded, and as the woman who’d cleaned him crawled out from under his desk and rose he stopped her with a hand on the shoulder, then slid it down to fondle her bare breasts. She waited, blank and expressionless, doing her duty as he enjoyed himself. “Yes. So this is not just out of character, it’s harmful to her.”

“Uh, right.”

“Something would have to compel her to such an action. Something significant.”

“Yeah.”

“Fascinating,” he said again, though in truth his attention was on his woman’s chest, the question of Penelope Rutherford’s actions consigned to his subconscious to deal with - something he did quite often. “Alright. I will not object if you go through with your deal, Howard. And thank you for telling me.”

“Oh, hey,” his friend said, and laughed a little nervously. “Any time. I mean, what are friends for, right?”

“I’ve often wondered,” he said, and hung up the phone. Setting it down on his desk, he turned his chair slightly to face his woman, and the hand that had held his phone took her other tit in hand.

“I should follow my instincts,” he said. “Right?”

“Anything you say, sir,” said 0005.

*

She’d parted ways from Chen a little while earlier. It had, in fact, been half the reason she’d passed the Ghost’s notes on hypnosis over. Gigi had told her that it was work for a team, and that was true; she’d just skipped mentioning that, as part of the Doctor’s collection, she had plenty of ‘teammate’ equals who would happily be ordered to work on it.

It would be good to have contacts in an organisation that had already made clear it would be hard to infiltrate in the traditional manner, but also, Gigi had a new lead. Something she’d held back from Chen.

If the Ghost was responsible for the abduction of Penelope Rutherford, as Gigi believed, then she wanted a head start on the authorities. Her orders were clear.

Deep in the paperwork she’d found an old bank statement. Not much of a lead on its own. But if you already had back door access into the bank’s database, it was a real name and an address and more.

She settled down cross-legged on the rooftop of his building, quietly opening her laptop. It would be good to see what, if any, traffic was passing through the devices in the buildings below.

*

There were two internet feeds active in the Capitol Ghost’s brownstone base of operations; one was a Peloton subscription on a small screen set into a treadmill on the third floor, where the woman who not long earlier had crashed into and through Gigi and Chen now stood, running, sweat running unarrested down her nude body, her physique honing more and more to muscle with every day that her Master kept her on this regimen.

Today she was receiving a double dose, and even with her superhuman endurance, the second marathon was pushing it for her. It wasn’t something she’d expected; she’d just been ordered, after she reported the break-in at his conditioning theatre, to work her regimen again.

It was exhausting. It was gruelling. And he had told her it was punishment, but she knew that made no sense. He was her Ghost, and she merely one of his stagehands. His wishes were paramount; anything he wanted, she was happy to perform.

He’d told her that himself. She remembered it clearly, remembered being strapped down on a slowly but steadily revolving table, the straight lines painted on the ceiling above her becoming the spirals that formed the maze in which her free will had been lost, while his voice poured honey into her open ears, shaping the way she thought.

So when he told her to exercise, and told her it was punishment, she didn’t understand; couldn’t understand. She was happy to perform his wishes. She would always be happy to perform his wishes.

On the floor below, a smart TV was streaming video, and that was the other internet feed; when Gigi got access to the stream she would see that it was not a covert feed from elsewhere in the city, was not an illicit brainwashing video hosted somewhere on the dark web, was not in fact anything more sinister than Prime Video.

Nobody’s attention was on the screen. Melissa’s attention was entirely on the small plastic bottle she’d just been handed; a bright pink container of lube. She could feel the blush rising to her cheeks, found herself startled by it.

Her top was off, and she knelt in front of the Capitol Ghost, who had shed most of his tuxedo leaving only the dress pants, black leather dress shoes, and white spatterdashes. He smelled of cedarwood pomade, and she suspected that he was almost never less composed or decorated than he was at that very moment.

She looked up, meeting his eyes with pride - why would she not be proud? She was the first of his Beautiful Assistants. His wishes were the most important thing in her world; anything he wanted, she was happy to perform.

Keeping her eyes on his, she unsnapped the cap on the lube bottle and raised it above her tits, one arm underneath to bring them together and lift them as she poured a decent measure onto them, especially into her cleavage. It was cold when it first touched her skin and her breath came out in a whickering combination of chill and satisfaction.

She set the bottle down between her thighs and used both hands to massage and spread the lube, then leaned forward slowly, taking his cock from his pants. She pillowed her tits around it, resting them on his thighs, and cupped her hands around them, bringing them in to embrace his cock.

It was the first time she had titfucked, but given the excitement in the eyes of her Ghost, Melissa was pleasingly confident that it wouldn’t be her last.

An idea struck her, but now was not the time, she decided. Keeping her eye contact up, she lowered her head and kissed the tip of his cock, her tongue flickering out to swirl around the head encouragingly, and then she began in earnest, close in against him, breathing in his scent, stroking and caressing and milking his cock with the softest part of her flesh against what she’d made the hardest part of his.

It felt so liberating. Mind control, Melissa had learned, often did. Her private doubts, uncertainties, and insecurities were irrelevant against the need to obey, and faded therefore into the background, leaving behind an obedient toy who was happy to be a slut.

An echo crossed her mind, a conversation (if you could call it that when one side of the conversation was deep in trance) she’d had when she first met Lulu on the Doctor’s island.

“First time getting mindfucked?”

“Yes.”

“Won’t be your last.”

The Doctor’s slave Candace had ordered her first mindfucking, and Melissa had gone on to serve. Now, though, she served her Ghost, and knew that this was right, that the similar conviction that the Doctor had been a worthy Master was just an illusion. Only now did she know her true destiny.

Just thinking about it she’d been stroking and pumping harder and harder, her eyes glazing over, lost in an unawareness of anything but her memories and the need to make her Ghost cum.

As she felt him tense she eased off, very slightly. It was good that he be on the edge when she brought her idea to him. “My Ghost,” she began, “I know you want other Beautiful Assistants.”

“Wh- uh - yes.” His answer came in gasps, a bewilderment in his tone that she was speaking, an unwillingness to think too deeply, a desire just to focus on her wonderful, wonderful tits.

Perfect conditions for her proposal. “I know a superteam, my Ghost,” she said. “I know their identities, their powers, their desires.

“And I will betray them to you if you only give the order.”

Almost immediately his cock erupted, painting her smooth, soft titflesh with his approval.