Chapter 5: Final Wishes
The night had been a shallow, restless sea. Anne lay stiff beside Leah in the narrow bed, listening to the rain and the echo of her own voice on that tape. She could still feel the ghost of Leah’s hands, scrubbing, probing. The memory was a live wire. At some point before dawn, Leah had turned and whispered into the darkness, “I hope the soap stung.” It wasn’t an apology. It was a confirmation. A shared scar.
A bell rang, its chime sharp and metallic from the hall. They rose without speaking, dressing in the plain grey shifts left out for them. The house was quiet, holding its breath.
Master Thorne’s study smelled of old violence and older money. Leather-bound books, their spines cracked, shared shelves with peculiar iron implements—things that looked like surgical tools or medieval fasteners, all rust-specked. The air was close, tasting of whiskey and polish. His desk was a vast landscape of scarred oak, and on it sat two familiar objects: the tape recorder and the folded parchment from the bath.
“Sit,” he said, not looking up from a ledger.
Two chairs waited. One was plush, upholstered in gold velvet so faded it was the color of stale urine. The other was leather, black and hardened by time, studded with tarnished brass. Anne instinctively moved toward the velvet. Leah took the hard seat.
He closed his ledger with a soft thud. “We will begin with a review. Then, we will move to a new exercise.” He pressed a button on the recorder.
Anne’s own voice filled the room, breathy and desperate. ‘…just a useful thing. A container. It doesn’t matter what goes in, as long as it’s what he wants to put there…’
Sitting in the cold light of day, hearing it, was worse. It was alien and yet intimately hers. She stared at her knees, heat flooding her cheeks. Leah sat motionless, but Anne saw her knuckles whiten where they gripped the arm of the chair.
Master Thorne let it play to the end. The final, shuddering sigh. The click. Silence rushed back in, thicker than before.
“Now,” he said, unfolding the parchment. He smoothed it on the desk between them. The joined sentences, their two signatures at the bottom. “Read it. Together. Anne, you start.”
Her throat sealed shut. She looked at her own shaky script. Tonight, I washed Leah everywhere Master commanded.
“Aloud,” he prompted, his voice a low warning.
She whispered it. The words were ash in her mouth.
Leah’s turn. She didn’t hesitate. Her voice was flat, hard. “Tonight, I cleaned the welts from Anne’s thighs and made her whimper.”
They went on, alternating, tossing the phrases back and forth like stones. I felt her shame under my hands and it felt like my own. I heard my confession in my head while I touched her, and I hated us both. Each line was a stitch, sewing them tighter into a shared narrative of degradation. When they finished, the room pulsed with a terrible intimacy.
Master Thorne leaned back, steepling his fingers. “Good. A cohesive narrative. You are learning to contextualize your experiences. To see the arc of your own worthlessness.” He paused, letting the words settle. “Now, for the exercise. I want you to articulate a fantasy. A wish. Not a fleeting thought, but a deep, true desire for how you might be used. To make the abstract… concrete.”
He looked at Anne. “You first. Sit on the floor here.” He pointed to a space by the side of his desk.
Anne slipped from the chair onto the cold, polished wood floor. She folded her legs beneath her, back straight, hands on her thighs. A learner at the feet of a teacher.
“Speak it,” he said.
She had known this was coming. The thought had been circling her since the tape, since the shower. It wasn’t a sudden inspiration. It was a root that had found its way into the darkest soil of her. She took a shaky breath.
“My wish,” she began, her voice small but clear in the silent room, “is to be furniture.”
Leah shifted in her seat. Anne didn’t look at her.
“Not just for a task. Permanently. For your study.” She kept her eyes on the carved claw foot of his desk. “I would be… a footstool. You would have me positioned right here, beside your chair. My body would be bent and secured into the most useful shape. My back would be flattened, reinforced maybe, to be a perfect, level surface for your feet.” Her words picked up speed, painting the picture. “My skin would be treated. Oiled leather, maybe. Something durable. My arms and legs would be fixed in place, curled underneath, out of the way.”
Master Thorne said nothing. He just watched, his expression unreadable.
“My neck would be supported,” Anne continued, a strange, serene horror settling over her. “My head held up. And my face… my lips would be stitched. Into a smile. A permanent, pleasant smile. So whenever you glanced down, or whenever a guest might see, I would look… content. Useful. Happy to serve as your ottoman.”
She finally risked a glance up. Leah was staring, her face pale. There was no disgust there, not exactly. It was something closer to awe. A terrifying recognition.
“I wouldn’t need to be fed,” Anne whispered, the final degradation. “Not really. Just maintained. I’d be quiet. I’d be still. I’d be here, holding your weight, every day. I’d be part of the room.” She let out a breath. “That’s my wish.”
The silence was absolute. Then Master Thorne reached down. He didn’t touch her body. He touched her hair. His fingers slid through the blonde strands, a slow, almost paternal caress.
“Beautiful,” he murmured. “A truly beautiful wish, Anne. So thoughtfully articulated. So complete in its submission. You have visualized your own obsolescence as a person and crafted it into a service. I am… impressed.”
His praise was a warm syrup, flooding her veins, making her dizzy. She leaned imperceptibly into his touch.
He looked at Leah. “Do you see the purity of it? The self-erasure? No rebellion. No hidden agenda. Just a desire to become an object in truth.”
Leah’s throat worked. She gave a tiny, stiff nod.
“Now you, Leah.” His hand left Anne’s hair. “Your turn. Sit on the floor.”
Leah rose from the hard chair. She moved with a slowness that seemed fought for, every muscle resisting. She sat on the floor a few feet from Anne, not looking at her.
“Your wish,” Master Thorne said. His voice held a new edge, a challenge. “Make it worthy of the precedent set.”
Leah’s chest rose and fell. She looked at the tools on the wall, at the rusted manacles. Her rebellious spirit was there, warring with the part of her that had been broken and rebuilt by his hands. The part that wanted to win at losing.
“Well?” he prompted, his tone light, almost conversational. “Cat got your tongue? Or are you just less imaginative?”
That did it. The spark flickered in her dark eyes. She lifted her chin.
“A footstool is… passive,” Leah said, her voice gaining strength. “It just is. My wish isn’t to be furniture.” She swallowed. “My wish is to be a tool. An active one.”
Master Thorne’s eyebrow raised a fraction. “Go on.”
“You have all these,” she said, gesturing vaguely at the walls. “But they’re cold. They don’t feel. They don’t learn.” She looked directly at him now. “I want to be the tool you use on her.”
Anne felt a jolt, like a small electric shock.
“When she is disobedient. Or when she needs a lesson. Or when you just want to hear her make a certain sound.” Leah’s words were coming faster, tumbling out. “You would tell me what to do. You would set the limits. And I would do it. I would hold her down. I would apply the crop or the strap or whatever you chose. I would be the one to make her cry. To make her thank you.” Her breath hitched. “I would get good at it. I would study her reactions. I would know exactly how to make it hurt, or how to make it sting, or how to make it last. I would be an extension of your will. But made of flesh. That knows what it’s like.”
She finished, her chest heaving. The room seemed to shrink.
Master Thorne was silent for a long moment. Then a slow, genuine smile spread across his face. It wasn't warm. It was the smile of a collector who has just been offered a coveted, dreadful piece.
“A tool,” he repeated softly. “A living instrument of discipline. To be used on the other. That is… profoundly ugly, Leah. It has a vicious elegance.”
He stood up from his desk. He walked around it and stood over them both, looking down at his two creations on the floor.
“Anne wishes to be an object of repose. Leah wishes to be an object of violence. Both wish to be used. Both wish to cease being ‘you’ in any meaningful sense.” He crouched down, bringing himself to their level. His gaze was avaricious. “These are exceptional wishes. Far more insightful than I anticipated.”
He reached out, this time cupping Leah’s cheek. She flinched, but didn’t pull away. “Your rebellion has finally found its true outlet. Not in defiance, but in enthusiastic compliance. In wanting to be the hand that strikes, because being the face that is struck is no longer enough. That is a deeper submission.”
He stood, the business of the day returning to his posture.
“We will explore these wishes. Not as metaphor. As practice.” He looked at the tape recorder, then at the parchment. “The narrative continues. You are writing it yourselves, in your own words. And I am merely the curator.”
He gestured dismissively. “You may go. Return to your room. Think on what you’ve asked for. The implications.”
The walk back to their room was silent, but the air between them crackled with everything they’d just uttered. The house felt different now, every closed door hinting at a possible future. Anne’s footstool. Leah’s tool. The concepts hung in the corridor, taking up space.
Their room was always cold. It seeped from the stone walls. Anne went straight to the bed, sitting on the edge, her hands folded in her lap. She stared at the wall opposite, the one with the single, high slit of a window.
Leah didn’t sit. She paced the narrow strip of floor, three steps one way, three steps back. Her movements were jerky, charged.
“A footstool,” Leah said suddenly, the words like a stone dropped into a still pond. “With a stitched smile. Jesus, Anne.”
Anne didn’t look at her. “You wanted to be a whip.”
“That’s different.”
“How?” Anne’s voice was quiet, genuinely curious.
“It just is.” Leah stopped pacing, facing her. “A whip is an action. A footstool is just… nothing. It’s giving up completely.”
“You think what you described isn’t giving up?” Now Anne looked at her, her blue eyes wide in the grey light. “You just asked to stop being you so completely that you become the thing that hurts me. That’s not giving up?”
“It’s choosing a side!” Leah’s voice rose, frustration boiling over. “It’s having a fucking purpose! You just want to disappear! To be a polite little ornament he rests his feet on while he reads. I want to be the reason his will gets done.”
Anne flinched. The truth of it was a physical slap. She looked back at the wall. “It’s the same thing,” she whispered. “We both want to stop being Leah and Anne.”
The silence stretched, thin and brittle. Leah’s breathing was loud in the quiet room. She walked to the window, pressing her forehead against the cold stone beside it.
“He loved yours more,” she said, her voice muffled.
“He didn’t.”
“He did. You could hear it. That… that tender voice. The hair stroking. ‘Beautiful,’ he said.” Leah’s imitation was perfect, cruel. “Mine was ‘ugly’. ‘Vicious’. He was thrilled by it, but he loved yours. The purity.”
Anne said nothing. A strange, sick triumph coiled in her stomach, immediately followed by shame. This was what he wanted. This fissure. This comparison.
“He’s going to make us do it, you know,” Leah said, turning from the window. Her eyes were dark pools. “Not literally stitch your face. But he’s going to make me prove it. He’s going to give me an instruction, and point at you.”
The reality of it landed between them, heavier than the fantasy. The theoretical was about to evaporate.
“I won’t fight you,” Anne said, the words automatic.
“I know!” Leah snapped, throwing her hands up. “That’s the whole fucking problem! You’ll just take it. You’ll make that little crying sound and thank me, and he’ll love it, and I’ll just be the…” She trailed off, the word ‘tool’ now tasting like ash.
“Then what do you want?” Anne asked, a spark of her own frustration igniting. “You volunteered! You looked him in the eye and told him you wanted to be the one to do it! Now you’re mad at me because I’ll let you?”
“I’m not mad at you.” Leah’s denial was weak. She was pacing again, a caged thing. “I don’t know what I am. I just… I needed to be better at it than you. More. And you go and wish for something so absolutely final that I can’t even compete. There’s no edge to being a footstool. There’s nothing to rebel against. It’s just… done.”
She stopped, a realization dawning on her face that was almost comical in its horror. “Oh, god. That’s why he loved it. That’s the real rebellion now, isn’t it? Submitting so totally that you leave no room for his games. You win by losing completely. I’m still trying to win by being the best loser, and you’ve just checked out of the game altogether.”
Anne hadn’t thought of it that way. The idea was dizzying. Had she, in her quest for perfect objecthood, found a way to defy him? No. That wasn’t it. This was deeper.
“It’s not a game to me,” Anne said softly. “It never was. You think it’s about him. It’s not. It’s about the noise in my head. The footstool… it’s quiet. The stitching… it means I don’t have to figure out what expression to wear. It’s just done. It’s peace.”
Leah stared at her. The anger bled out of her shoulders, replaced by a kind of bewildered exhaustion. She sank onto the floor, her back against the stone wall, legs splayed.
“Peace,” she repeated, tasting the word. “You think that’s what that would be?”
“I do.”
“And my way? Being the thing that makes you scream? What’s that?”
Anne met her gaze. The answer was so obvious it was painful. “That’s the noise.”
Leah’s face crumpled. It wasn’t into tears. It was a contraction of raw, unadorned understanding. She looked away, chewing on her thumbnail, a rough, anxious gesture.
The bell chimed in the hall. It was too soon. Dinner wasn’t for hours. This was a summoning.
They both froze, their shared glance holding the same electric dread. The implications were over. The practice was about to begin.
Leah stood first. She offered a hand to Anne, not meeting her eyes. After a beat, Anne took it. Her skin was cool, Leah’s was warm and slightly damp.
“Whatever he asks,” Leah said, her voice low and hurried as they moved to the door. “However he wants to… start. I’ll do it. But you have to tell me. After. You have to tell me if it was quiet. Or if it was just more noise.”
Anne nodded, a tight, desperate little motion. The hallway outside seemed longer, darker, the path back to the study a tunnel leading to a place where their words were about to become flesh.
Leah’s hand let go. She squared her shoulders, a soldier stepping onto a field. She was the first to step out.
“I’ll go,” she said, not looking back. “I’ll volunteer. For whatever it is.”