The entrance to Frozen Vice clearly had a bouncer in place most of the time, but there was no doorman standing by when Cushla, almost fresh from the slopes, stopped by.

During the day she and her friend had loved every moment of the slopes, but the name, Frozen Vice, had seemed wedged into Cushla’s head somewhere that her thoughts couldn’t help but bounce off it again and again. She knew that Colleen would never want to check out a place with a name like that even if it had Ethan’s seal of approval (and truth be told, she wasn’t sure she should trust Ethan’s judgement on it either, though she did).

Ordinarily they would be part of the same evening activity every time. They had a rule, which was to be inseparable until midnight. After midnight, if one or both of them were single, all bets were off - why not take time to enjoy themselves? - but sneaking off to a club alone was unheard of on these trips.

All the same, Cushla had claimed the first shower when they returned to their apartment, and while Colleen was taking her turn, Cushla had dressed hurriedly and slipped out of the house, heading away from the ski centre and into the part of Whistler only frequented by locals.

Her feet had known every corner and every turn she’d needed to navigate her way through the streets and find the club. This should have been remarkable, but it passed by without her noticing.

If she’d been asked to guess, before she pushed the front door open and stepped in, she would have guessed black or unpainted brick walls, low lighting, one or perhaps two stages for dancers, and a matte black bar lit with pink neon. It looked like that kind of place, and the name didn’t exactly contradict that impression.

She had been partly right. The walls were unpainted brick and the lighting rigs suspended from the ceiling were set up for a dimly lit nightclub, though it was brightly lit at that point with the main overheads. There was one long, runway-like stage with three separate gleaming chrome poles running from the top of the stage to the ceiling, and there were two large cages suspended from the ceiling occupying a corner each.

Her initial impression was of oversized birdcages before the dimensions sank in properly; these were for cage dancers. Along the wall between them were a number of wooden objects, all made from two or more big pieces of lumber joined together in various configurations of cross. The lumber had been varnished a beautiful deep, glossy brown. All but one one had four or more black leather straps with gleaming buckles attached. The last was draped in heavy, gunmetal-blue chains.

Cushla had never seen the odder cross configurations before, and never seen any of them in person. It was immediately clear to her, though, that they had to be bondage paraphernalia of some kind. Someone would be strapped to one, and then…

Her imagination failed her. Father McCaffrey would not have considered Cushla a good Catholic girl if he knew some of the things she’d got up to, but he would not have bothered to remark at any of her proclivities; She enjoyed what she enjoyed and didn’t think about the rest.

The bar was the same varnished brown, and probably the oldest fixture in the place, Cushla thought; it was lit not by pink neon but by soft blue lamps, although even they were only barely visible with the main house lights up.

Besides herself, there were only three people there; one man behind the bar in black jeans and t-shirt, and, over by the stage, Ethan stood, hands in the back pockets of his blue jeans, torso padded out by layers topped with his plaid shirt, listening to a woman who stood maybe a foot shorter than him - probably more without those tall heels.

The woman was older than the others, probably in her mid-forties, but still stunning. She had tied her black hair back into a tight bun to which the streak of silver became an alluring accent, and her figure was accentuated by the black rubber pants and corset she was wearing. Above the bustline, she wore nothing, leaving her arms bare except for one black leather wristband on her left arm.

She was pointing at the stage as she talked. Cushla watched Ethan listening to her from where she’d stopped near the front door, hovering and uncertain, until she caught the man behind the bar looking at her curiously.

She blushed and smiled and made her way across to Ethan and the woman, hoping it was the right thing to do. Whether it was or not, it felt like the only thing she could do which confirmed she should be there to the third man.

Ethan spotted her before the woman did - Cushla could see that cocky smile of his suddenly spring to his lips - but that was enough for her, too, to look over and see Cushla. She broke off what she’d been saying and turned her head to look back at him.

Suddenly Ethan was looking bashful. Cushla nearly burst out laughing at the transformation. Something inside her seemed to cut off the laughter but not the amusement behind it.

“So, uh, hi. Is this too early?” she asked. It was the kind of question she usually asked as a deflection when she felt nervous, but she wasn’t nervous. In fact the feeling of guilt at sneaking away from Colleen and abandoning her was gone, too, replaced by a sensation of peaceful inevitability that tingled through the scalp at the back of her head.

“No, any time is fine,” Ethan reassured her. “How was your day?”

“Oh,” she said distractedly, “Good. You mentioned this place, so I thought I’d stop by.”

The woman chuckled. “Every time,” she said. “Do you give them a script?”

Cushla looked between them, confused. “Don’t have to,” Ethan said. “Rationalisation, you know? Only so many ways for them to justify it to themselves.”

She opened her mouth to say something, she wasn’t sure what yet. Ethan smiled.

“Skip a beat, Cushla,” he said. His voice was low, but he pitched it firmly enough to be sure she’d hear him.

Cushla’s dizzy, tired, drained head moved seamlessly from the thoughts and confusion underlying her eerie calm into an absence of thought. Her mouth hung open, her eyelids fluttered, and her eyes then rolled up into her head. Her body became strangely still. Her head was empty.

She was still aware. “I’ll give you this,” the woman said. “She could look the part easily enough.”

“As if I’d ever bring across someone who wasn’t,” Ethan said. “So the question is what do we do with her?”

“Well, let’s see what she can do.”

“No problem. Cushla, get onto the stage.”

“I hear,” she answered, “and I obey.” And she turned, her vision clearing, and stepped over toward the stage. There were steps up to it at one side, near a large doorway covered by a curtain. She climbed the stairs and walked dreamily round to stand by one of the poles, in front of where Ethan and the woman were waiting.

“Cushla,” Ethan said. “You’re about to hear some music. When you do, you will find you want to dance to it. Isn’t that right?”

“I hear and I obey.”

“When you dance, you are doing so with a purpose,” he continued. “You dance to arouse others with your body. Is that clear?”

“I hear and understand.” She was perfectly calm as she listened to Ethan describe things about her which were true. It was balm to her soul to be so fully understood.

“You will make your dance a striptease, and you will direct that toward me and Trish. Isn’t that right?”

“I hear and I obey.”

Her lips were parted, but she was smiling, a dazed, open smile that had no hint of concealment or thought or even her personality. She was simply happy, and no part of her was thinking to consider how she might appear.

It was strangely freeing.

The woman - Trish; even without consciously thinking Cushla had managed to piece that together - was fiddling with her phone, and music started to boom out over the club’s sound system.

And she began to dance.

A small part of her was watching Ethan and Trish, trying to gauge their reactions. The rest of her was heedless of anything but the need to dance and the pleasure of her own body’s motion, the languid drift of her limbs as she writhed and twisted to the music.

The big puffer jacket went early, and yet it nearly derailed the entire dance. Those narrow elasticated wrists were not part of a garment designed to be easily shrugged out of, and they threw off her balance and her rhythm for a few moments.

Beneath was easier, because she’d dressed for a club. Actually, she’d dressed in a combination of the most daring and risque parts of the wardrobe she’d brought with her, including wearing a tight mesh longsleeve without a halter top or bra underneath to preserve her modesty.

It wasn’t until she saw her reflection in a tall mirror at the far end of the room from the stage, back by the entrance, that she realised just how revealing an outfit she was wearing, especially for one that technically covered her from toe to neck and neck to wrist. She must have just grabbed the nearest things to hand because she was in a hurry, and simply hadn’t thought about it.

Cushla did not execute a perfect striptease. It might more accurately have been described as amateurish. She was sure Ethan had enjoyed it, but aside from a few individual moments and moves that had seen Trish purse her lips and give a grudging nod, she didn’t think she’d really nailed it with her, even when she started to use the pole as something to dance with.

Eventually the music stopped. Cushla had been just tucking her thumbs into the waistband of her panties when it cut out, and she stopped dancing immediately.

She didn’t exactly freeze in place, but it wasn’t too far away either. She stood uncertainly, still gripping her panties by the hips, and licked suddenly dry lips.

She looked at Ethan and Trish, then glanced at the man behind the bar, met his smirking gaze, and looked back to the other two.

She would need them to tell her what to do before she did anything. She understood this implicitly but did not think it, did not know it. It was simply a fact of reality she had internalised.

“Not ready for prime time yet,” Ethan said. It wasn’t a criticism. It wasn’t sympathetic. It was a flat statement with no judgement, like a mechanic telling someone their car would take more work before it could be driven.

“No,” Trish said thoughtfully. “But useful, though.”

“Good. She’s got a friend, too.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Not ready yet. Cushla’s going to help me with that.”

Cushla heard all of this. None of it was an instruction. The last sentence felt like it might be a description. “I hear and understand,” she said, because that was what she was tasked to do when she was described. There was no conscious assessment of what she was listening to.

Ethan and Trish turned and looked at her after she said that. She was still standing, naked except for the trainers she’d worn to get her to the club and her panties, smiling vacantly. Their expressions were impossible for her to read in that state.

“Well, we won’t worry about her friend yet. You, come down here.”

Cushla stood, unmoving. An instruction had to be from Ethan, it turned out. That was interesting. His lips twitched with amusement.

“Do as she says now, Cushla,” Ethan said.

Cushla obeyed. Rather than retrace her steps and descend the steps, she took two steps to the edge of the stage then hopped down, landing smoothly and taking two more steps closer to Trish and Ethan. She looked up at them both, feeling placid and calm.

“So what would you like?” Ethan asked.

*

When the club opened properly, Cushla was sitting backstage. Her own clothing having been dismissed as ‘not ski bunny tourist enough’ she had been handed a pair of day-glo orange ski leggings (very old, by the way the stretch had started to give) and a tight fitting white top knit from fluffy wool (very scratchy, and therefore probably unwanted) and told to put them on.

Cushla was not the only one sitting backstage; there were six other women, all of whom were wearing similar outfits. Unlike her, they were lively and chatty, while she simply sat and waited. It was incredibly peaceful; she barely even registered the passage of time. There was no clock backstage, and the only other thing she might use to measure the passage of time would have been her thoughts, but none of those occurred. Ethan had been very clear on that.

If she had thought anything, the one which would have been most prominent, reoccurring several times, would have been to do with the fact the other women, dancers and performers, showed absolutely no surprise at a woman sitting almost completely still and silent among them, even blinking less than the others.

She continued to sit there after the first three girls had gone out to perform, while the others - later arrivals - were putting the final touches to their appearance. Mostly they had gone for more revealing outfits than Trish’s, but in a similar style, in black leather or latex.

Their bodies were lean and well-toned, though two had obviously opted to get implants.

As one of those three made her way back in, so did Trish, who grabbed something from a nearby table and walked over in front of Cushla. “Hands,” she said.

It was not an order, but it was a condition in an order Ethan had given, and which she had been waiting for. She held out her hands in front of her, her wrists about four inches apart, fists clenched. Trish looped a length of chain around them both, then around itself between them, and then attached a padlock to keep this makeshift binding in place. The rest of the chain, another several feet, she kept in hand.

Cushla stood. Trish made her way over to the curtains that separated this dressing room from the main club, and Cushla followed, about three paces behind. Trish was holding the chain looped loosely around her hand, enough that no slack in her grip.

They both waited. Another woman’s voice came over the speakers. “Gentlemen,” whoever it was announced. “Are you ready for the first big event of the evening?”

Sporadic cheers resulted. There wasn’t the full-fledged enthusiasm of a crowd - or not yet - but those in attendance were confident of liking what was coming. Someone contributed a wolf whistle.

“That’s good,” she continued. “Because we have a treat for you all tonight. We spared no expense, and Frozen Vice remains the only place in town where you can see a tourist bunny get… what… she… deserves!”

The cheers this time were raucous. Trish tugged on the chain and marched through the curtain, with Cushla following her closely.

Her face did not match the calm she felt inside. Instead she looked confused, bewildered, and apprehensive.

In truth, Cushla was none of these things. Ethan had told her what to expect to happen. Had even told her how it would feel and what she would think about it. But he had also told her how to look.

No. Not how to look. He had told her how she would look.

Cushla was no actress, but the expression on her face convinced everyone there. The men cheered again at her unveiling, lifting beer bottles high in the air in a salute of welcome.

Trish turned to face her and gripped the chain more firmly. She tugged, and Cushla tugged away, but Trish tugged again.

Cushla had been told to lose this tug of war, but it had not been needed. When Trish actually put effort into it, she would have lost regardless. She stumbled forward, fetching up almost pressed against Trish, who reached her free arm around, grabbing Cushla by the buttock. She looked at the crowd, who roared their approval, and then squeezed.

Pleasure fizzed through Cushla, filling her with an intensity beyond her expectation. The audience was enjoying her discomfiture, and Ethan had told her the audience’s pleasure would fuel her own. She would, had her head been entirely her own, have been mortified, and Ethan had told her any embarrassment would fuel her pleasure. That might be it, or it might be that the act itself gave her pleasure, and this fuelled her pleasure without Ethan needing to tell her so.

Trish turned them both on the spot, using their clinch to do so, and then backed Cushla up against one of the polished wooden crosses. This one was more an X than a cross, and Trish used her own foot, sliding it between Cushla’s, to spread her legs apart until they were at the same angle as the lower branches of the cross.

One of the dancers, probably the one who had been talking, came over. Her black PVC was hotpants and thigh-high boots, and she wore a black velvet bustier above them with heavy boning.

She strapped Cushla’s left leg to the cross, then her right, while Trish held her pinned against the cross with the flat of one hand. Each step was cheered by the crowd, who were louder and more excited now than they had been for the butt grab, when they had been louder and more excited than they were when Cushla was led into view. Their excitement and the show they were watching had started to feed off one another, a vicious cycle of increasing intensity.

Trish and her helper made great play of removing the padlock from the chain and undoing the loop, but quickly securing a smaller loop just around her right wrist. The helper slipped behind the cross with the chain, which she lifted up and looped around the top of the right half of the cross, such that Cushla was trapped.

This was also the point where Ethan had told her to look out across the crowd, meeting each of their eyes in turn, and let each of them feel the fear on her face.

Each new pair of eyes she took in was another electric jolt of arousal and heat, just as he had told her it would be. Her expression remained realistic, and did not slip, but inside, as calm as she was, she was also aroused and needy, and growing more so.

The long chain was then wrapped around the other upper branch, and Trish took hold of her left arm and lifted it to be chained to the cross in turn.

“There’s no getting away now,” she informed the crowd, to its clear relish. Whistler was a town sustained by the tourist trade, but very few of the people working in such towns are altogether happy with their visitors.

Trish reached into the leather cuff she wore on one wrist and produced a stubby metallic block, which she unfurled with practiced ease to reveal a short-bladed knife.

She flourished it dramatically. Cushla looked out at the crowd and became aware of her body becoming completely still. She was so still, and such a hush had come upon the watching crowd, that she could hear her own heartbeat, slow and steady.

For a moment her perception seemed to fragment, such that with part of her mind she felt the still-cool chain link against the inside of her wrist, and with the other part she felt Ethan’s fingers tapping gently against her skin.

Trish lifted her knife, using its tip to snag the collar of the itchy white wooly jumper Cushla was wearing. She began to cut down, and Cushla remained perfectly still and unmoving. The fabric parted easily under a sharp blade.

When the cut was complete, Trish parted the fabric with her hands and stepped back and to the side, allowing the audience beneath them to see Cushla’s bared tits - and to confirm for themselves that no blood had been drawn. A sigh of something like relief escaped.

She made two more cuts, more careful ones, from the wrists of the jumper down the underside of each arm, and along until the blade emerged into a prior cut. Then, standing beside Cushla, she tool hold of the jumper at the small of Cushla’s back and swept her hand down, whisking the jumper away from her now topless form

Someone let loose with a wolf whistle and the silence was gone, the tension released. Nervous laughter followed by loud chatter escaped the audience.

Cushla shivered with hidden delight. Perhaps Trish spotted that; perhaps she had some other reason to take the woman by the nipple and pinch. Cushla moaned happily, and for a moment the facade Ethan has instructed her on went away; his instructions hadn’t taken into account any improvisations by Trish.

For the leggings, Trish handed the knife off to the other woman, who made a series of small cuts around the waistband and the ankle cuffs. It took a little while, and Cushla was again almost impossibly still throughout.

Trish and the other woman took hold of the leggings around each hip and looked to each other, then pulled forward. The old material had already been ready to give, and with this encouragement it did so quickly, coming away from her legs with a continuous tearing sound to the accompaniment of cheers.

Cushla was now chained and strapped to the St Andrews’ cross wearing only her panties, with a large audience gathered in front of her drinking its beer and delighting in a tourist receiving this treatment. She was also very close to orgasm, and would already have fallen to it had Ethan not explained to her that she now needed permission whenever she wanted one.

The other woman disappeared and the music began. Cushla spent a song strapped to the cross while Trish looked on. She was no longer required to be still, and she was not; music was playing and, while she couldn’t move her hands or her ankles, her waist was not restrained. Shaking her hips, she danced along to the tune, which drew laughter from those of the audience not looking at either the cage dancer or the pole dancer.

Her eyes found Ethan, who was leaning against the bar watching her thoughtfully and drinking beer from the bottle. When he saw that she was looking at him, he winked.

A couple of songs later, Trish brought out two long bundles, like flails made of soft leather in wide strips.

Taking one in each hand she started to wield them in a figure-eight kind of motion, not at high speed, not with all her strength, but simply with enough that when the many trailing leather strips slapped against her breasts and nipples, the impact throbbed through Cushla. This too drew an approving audience.

And it felt incredible. Ethan had explained to her that she would be struck, but that Trish would be careful and no marks would be left; he had told her this would bring her pleasure.

It did.

Ethan always seemed to be right.

By the time Trish finally stopped everything from the undercurve of her breasts up to the point where the incline down into them reduces enough to match the chest from which it rises was aching softly, in a way that was pleasure with a light protest rather than pain.

“What do we think?” Trish asked the crowd. “Has our volunteer earned Whistler’s respect?”

It was the kind of question that only ever gets one answer and, indeed, they cheered her and Trish roundly. With the other dancer rejoining, Cushla was released from the cross.

She took a bow, as directed, and walked into the dressing room.

Ethan was the only one in there. She went over to him, which was the last of the instructions he had given her.

It was as if her head was a phone which had been out of range of cell towers until just that moment. Suddenly all the thoughts she hadn’t had began to roll through her mind. Too many to take in all at once. Her breath caught.

He must have noticed. “Skip a beat, Cushla,” he said.

Cushla’s dizzy, tired, drained head moved seamlessly from the thoughts and confusion underlying her eerie calm into an absence of thought. Her mouth hung open, her eyelids fluttered, and her eyes then rolled up into her head. Her body became strangely still. Her head was empty.

He smiled and stood. “Follow me,” he said.

“I hear and I obey,” she answered.

He led her into a small office just off a corridor from the dressing room. There was nobody else there.

“Bend over the table,” he told her.

“I hear and I obey,” she said, doing exactly as she had been told.

“You don’t need to feel overwhelmed when you wake up after a session,” he told her. “You will feel the same peace you do now, and any thoughts or concerns that will challenge that simply don’t make it to you. You will only think the thoughts that matter. Do you understand?”

“I hear and understand,” she answered.

“That’s a good girl,” he said. She heard the rattle of his belt buckle, the zip of his fly. When his cock plunged into her she began to buck back against it, eager and ready, and all of her pent up arousal from the time she couldn’t cum suddenly the most pressing thing in her mind.

*

It was midnight when Cushla, dressed again as she had been before her audition striptease, pushed open the door to her holiday home.

Colleen was sat there watching local TV. An open and mostly-empty pizza box and a large bottle of wine suggested her night hadn’t been a total loss.

“Where on earth have you been?” she asked.

Cushla hesitated. She couldn’t really remember much, but she remembered one thing. “I decided to see how handy our handyman really is,” she said with a grin.

Colleen sat back and looked at her. “You could have told me,” she said.

“Yeah.” Cushla didn’t have an answer to that, not really. Her hands went into her jacket pockets as they often did when she was lying.

In one of the pockets she felt a smooth round cylinder. Bemused, she pulled it out and looked at it.

A wax candle, in red.

She found herself smiling. “I have to show you something,” she said.