Yanna woke to silence. Not the gentle, pre-dawn quiet of her old boarding house, punctuated by the distant crow of a rooster or the first rumblings of a passing tricycle. This was an absolute, tomb-like silence. A dead silence, manufactured and sterile, the kind that exists only in soundproofed rooms and deep space. It pressed in on her ears, a suffocating blanket of nothing. The air itself was wrong. It was cool, dry, and tasted of nothing, recycled and scrubbed clean of any scent of life. She was breathing, but it felt like she was getting no oxygen.
She opened her eyes. The room was a study in luxurious minimalism, a beautifully appointed cell. The walls were a soft, matte grey. The floor was the same polished concrete as the rest of the penthouse. There was a single, frameless piece of art on the wall opposite her—a chaotic slash of black on a white canvas. The bed she lay in was immense, the sheets impossibly soft, the mattress a cloud that had swallowed her during the night. It was the most comfortable bed she had ever slept in, and it felt like a sarcophagus. There was no window. No connection to the outside world, to the sun, to time itself.
Panic, cold and sharp, began to prickle at the edges of her consciousness. She sat up, her heart starting to hammer against her ribs. The events of the previous day came rushing back, not as a memory, but as a physical weight settling in her gut. The contract. The signature. The sale of her life for the price of a suit. She was here. This was real. This was her new reality.
Her eyes darted around the room, searching for… she didn't know what. An escape hatch. A clue. A sign that this was all a terrible, elaborate dream. Her gaze fell on the single piece of furniture besides the bed: a low, black nightstand. On it sat a glass of water and a single, folded sheet of thick, cream-colored paper. The same expensive cardstock as the invoice.
With a sense of dread so profound it made her hands tremble, she reached for it. It was not a welcome note. It was a commandment. The text was printed in the same severe, elegant font as the contract.
6:30 a.m. You will be awake and showered.
7:00 a.m. You will bring my coffee—black, no sugar—to my study.
Be punctual. Punctuality is a virtue. Laziness is a sin.
The words were cold, impersonal, almost religious in their pronouncement. Virtue. Sin. This wasn't a schedule; it was scripture. The scripture of her new god. A clock on the nightstand, its red numerals glowing in the dim light, read 6:17 a.m.
Thirteen minutes.
A jolt of pure adrenaline shot through her, blasting away the last vestiges of sleep. She threw back the covers and scrambled out of the bed, her bare feet hitting the cold concrete with a slap. She found the bathroom, another marvel of minimalist design, all grey slate and chrome fixtures that looked like they belonged in a museum. She showered in record time, the water pressure a violent, stinging force. She didn't dare use the expensive-looking soaps and shampoos, instead using the small, cheap bar of soap she had in her bag. She dressed in the same simple white blouse and black trousers she had worn the day before. They were her uniform now. The uniform of the damned.
Her hands were shaking as she exited the room, her heart pounding a frantic rhythm against her ribs. The penthouse in the morning was even more intimidating than it had been the day before. Sunlight streamed through the massive floor-to-ceiling windows, illuminating every speck of dust, though there was none to be found. The silence was still absolute, broken only by the sound of her own frantic pulse.
The kitchen. Where was the kitchen? The penthouse was a labyrinth of white walls and identical-looking hallways. She took a wrong turn, ending up in a vast, empty space that seemed to be a formal dining room, dominated by a table long enough to seat twenty. A dead end. Panic began to claw at her throat. She backtracked, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps. The clock was ticking. Every second was a step closer to sin.
She finally found it. The kitchen was an intimidating landscape of stainless steel and black granite. It wasn't a kitchen; it was a laboratory. The appliances were all professional-grade, sleek and seamless, with no visible buttons or knobs. The coffee machine was a terrifying, chrome beast built into the wall, with a digital display that was currently dark. It looked more complicated than the cockpit of an airplane.
"No, no, no," she whispered, her hands flying over the smooth surface, searching for a power button, a switch, anything. She finally found a small, almost invisible indentation. She pressed it, and the machine whirred to life, its screen illuminating with a dizzying array of options. Espresso. Lungo. Americano. Cappuccino. Flat White. The words were meaningless to her. She just needed black coffee.
She fumbled with the machine, trying to find the right settings. The beans were in a hopper, but where did the water go? She pulled open a drawer and found a bag of coffee grounds. Were these the right ones? She spilled some on the pristine granite countertop, her shaking hands making the mess worse as she tried to scoop it up. She could feel the seconds ticking away, each one a tiny hammer blow against her sanity. The clock on the microwave read 6:58. Two minutes.
She finally managed to produce a single cup of what looked and smelled like coffee. It was dark, almost black. It would have to do. The cup was a delicate, handle-less porcelain thing that was hot to the touch. She grabbed it, nearly sloshing the dark liquid over the sides, and rushed out of the kitchen.
She ran down the long, white hallway toward the study, her heart in her throat. She could see the door at the far end. She could make it. She burst into the room, her chest heaving.
The study was empty.
The room was exactly as she had left it the day before: a silent, cold command center. The monitors glowed with their endless river of data. The air was still and cool. And on the far wall, a large, digital clock glowed with serene, damning red numbers.
7:05 a.m.
She had failed. On her very first task, on her very first day, she had failed. A wave of cold, sick despair washed over her. She stood there, frozen, the cup of cooling coffee in her hand a worthless, pathetic offering. The silence was her accuser. It mocked her frantic effort, her pathetic rush. It told her that all her panic and struggle had amounted to nothing.
Then, a sound crackled through the silence, making her jump so violently she almost dropped the cup. The intercom.
Camille's voice filled the room. It was not broadcast from a speaker; it seemed to emanate from the very air around her—disembodied, perfectly calm, and chillingly clear.
"Foyer. Now."
Yanna's blood ran cold. She placed the cup of coffee down on the massive black desk, a tiny, insignificant object in a landscape of power. Then, her legs feeling like lead, she walked out of the study and down the hall to face her judgment.
She found Camille in the vast, echoing foyer, standing by a minimalist console table against one wall. Camille wasn't looking at Yanna. Her attention was fixed on an object on the table, an ornate, old-fashioned hourglass of dark wood and brass. The last few grains of red sand were just trickling into the bottom bulb. As Yanna stopped a few feet away, the final grain fell.
Silence.
Camille let the silence stretch, a form of torture in itself. Finally, she lifted her gaze from the hourglass and looked at Yanna. Her expression was not one of anger. It was one of calm, profound disappointment, the look of a scientist observing a failed experiment. It was infinitely more terrifying.
"Five minutes," Camille said, her voice a low, soft murmur that carried with perfect clarity in the dead air. "An eternity in my world. A lifetime of transactions can occur in five minutes. A company can be acquired. A fortune can be lost." She took a slow, deliberate step closer. "A debt in yours."
She stopped, close enough now that Yanna could smell the faint, clean scent of her soap. "You have begun our arrangement with a failure of discipline," she continued, her voice still quiet, still maddeningly calm. "This demonstrates a lack of respect for my time, which is a lack of respect for me. This requires immediate, practical education."
Yanna's mouth was dry. She couldn't speak. She could only stand there, transfixed by those amber eyes, a rabbit caught in the gaze of a snake.
Camille's next command was so banal, so domestic, that it was deeply sinister. "In the pantry, to the left of the kitchen, you will find a sack of munggo beans. Bring it here."
Yanna stared at her, uncomprehending. Mung beans? The small, green beans her mother used to make soup? What did that have to do with anything? But the look in Camille's eyes told her this was not a request to be questioned. She turned and walked on trembling legs toward the kitchen. She found the pantry, a vast, walk-in closet filled with neatly organized shelves of food, most of which she didn't recognize. And there, on the floor, was a large, burlap sack. It was heavy. At least twenty kilos. She grunted with the effort of dragging it out of the pantry and back down the hall to the foyer.
"Here," Camille said, pointing to a spot on the white marble floor in the center of the vast, empty space. "Pour them out. Make a circle. About a meter in diameter."
This was the true beginning of the horror. The act of self-humiliation. With her hands shaking so badly she could barely untie the knot, Yanna opened the sack. She tilted it, and the small, hard, green beans began to pour out. The sound was deafening in the silence. A dry, rustling hiss that escalated into a loud, clattering roar as thousands of tiny, hard pellets scattered across the pristine marble floor. It was the sound of her own punishment being built, stone by stone, by her own hands. She shaped the pile into a rough circle, a perfect, ugly ring of green on the flawless white.
Camille walked over and inspected her work, her expression unreadable. She circled the pile of beans once, her soft leather loafers making no sound. Then she stopped and looked at Yanna. Her commands were simple, direct, and absolute.
"Kneel."
Yanna's breath hitched.
"In the center," Camille clarified, her voice leaving no room for argument. "Your back straight. Your hands clasped behind you. You will face the wall."
Yanna's mind screamed. No. Don't do it. Run. But her body, already conditioned by a terror more profound than any she had ever known, betrayed her. She stepped into the circle of beans, the hard little pellets shifting and rolling under her feet. She took a shuddering breath and slowly, agonizingly, lowered herself to her knees.
The pain was immediate. Sharp. White-hot. A hundred tiny, unyielding points of stone digging into the soft flesh of her kneecaps, grinding against the bone. A strangled gasp escaped her lips.
"Hands behind your back," Camille's voice commanded from somewhere behind her.
Yanna squeezed her eyes shut, hot tears of pain and humiliation threatening to spill over. She forced her trembling hands behind her back, clasping them together. Her posture was ramrod straight, every muscle in her body screaming in protest. She stared at the blank, white, featureless wall in front of her.
"You will remain here for one hour," Camille said. The pronouncement was delivered with the dispassionate finality of a judge sentencing a criminal. "A generous equation, I think. Twelve minutes of correction for every one minute of infraction. We can revisit the mathematics of it for your next failure."
A pause. Then, the sound of footsteps walking away. The punishment had begun.
The first ten minutes were a war. A brutal, internal conflict waged between the screaming agony in her knees and the frantic, panicked voice in her head. Get up. Just get up and run. You can't do this. You can't take this. The pain was a living thing, a fire that consumed her from the knees up. Each tiny mung bean was a focused point of torture, a needle of stone driving into her flesh. She could feel her skin breaking, the pressure grinding her kneecaps against the unyielding marble beneath. She bit down on her lip, tasting the coppery tang of her own blood, trying to use that smaller pain as an anchor against the vast ocean of agony she was drowning in. She imagined her mother's face, her sister's smile. It didn't help. It only made the shame, the profound, gut-wrenching shame of her situation, burn hotter.
Her world shrank to the size of her own suffering. There was nothing but the pain in her knees, the cold smoothness of the wall in front of her, and the frantic, useless beating of her own heart. She squeezed her hands together behind her back, her knuckles white, her muscles quivering with the strain of holding her posture. The temptation to slump, to shift her weight even a single millimeter, was a siren's call. But the memory of Camille's disappointed eyes was a more powerful force. She would not fail this, too.
After an eternity that was probably only fifteen minutes, something began to shift. The pain did not lessen. If anything, it grew, a deep, throbbing, all-consuming fire. But her mind, unable to fight it any longer, began to surrender. It was then that the auditory torture began. Her world, once defined by pain, now began to be defined by sound.
It started with the sound of Camille's life. The crisp, authoritative click-clack of her heels receding down the long marble hallway. The sound was a measure of distance, each click taking her further away, leaving Yanna more alone. Then, the soft, distant thud of the study door closing. It was a sound of finality, of a sealed-off world, a world of power and purpose from which Yanna was now utterly excluded.
A long, maddening silence followed. It was not the tomb-like silence of her bedroom. This was a silence that screamed her own irrelevance. It was the silence of a house whose owner had forgotten that a piece of furniture was kneeling in the foyer. Yanna was an object. A thing being corrected. Her suffering was a process, not an event worthy of attention.
Then, a new sound, faint and polite, drifted down the hallway. The gentle, electronic chime of a video conference call connecting. Yanna pictured Camille in her leather throne, her face composed, her mind engaged. A moment later, she heard the voice. Camille's voice. It was a low, confident, incomprehensible murmur. The words were indistinct, lost in the distance, but the cadence was unmistakable. It was the rhythm of effortless command. The calm, measured tone of someone discussing billion-peso deals, of someone shaping the world with her words, while a hundred feet away, the girl who had spilled champagne on her knelt in agony on a pile of dried beans.
Every murmur was a fresh wave of humiliation. Every confident laugh, every sharp, decisive phrase that floated down the hall was an intimate, brutal reminder of her new place in the universe. She was not a person. She was a punishment. She was a lesson being taught. Camille was power. Camille was the world. Yanna was just a mess on the floor.
The call went on for what felt like hours. Yanna's sense of time had dissolved. There was only the roaring fire in her knees and the distant, powerful murmur of her owner's voice. The pain had become a constant, a baseline reality. Her body trembled with exhaustion, her back muscles screaming from the effort of staying upright. Sweat trickled down her temples, stinging her eyes. She was a statue of misery, carved from trembling flesh.
At the forty-five-minute mark, the call ended. The murmur ceased, plunging the penthouse back into that terrible, accusatory silence. A new tension filled the air. Yanna listened, her ears straining, every nerve ending alive with a new kind of dread. And then she heard it. Footsteps. Soft, measured footsteps approaching from the study. They were not the sharp clicks of heels. These were the near-silent steps of soft leather loafers on marble. Camille was coming.
Yanna's entire body tensed. A frantic prayer began in her mind. Please just walk past. Please don't stop. Don't look at me. Don't touch me, please don't touch me.
The footsteps grew closer, then stopped. Directly behind her.
Yanna held her breath, her heart hammering against her ribs. She couldn't see her, but she could feel her. She could feel the subtle shift in the air currents as Camille's body displaced the space behind her. She could smell it—the faint, clean, expensive scent of Camille's perfume. The scent of soap and silk and something subtly floral. It was the scent she now associated with absolute power, with cold judgment, with this white-hot pain. It filled her senses, a violation in itself.
Camille began to circle her. Slowly. Deliberately. A predator inspecting its prey. Yanna remained frozen, staring at the white wall, every muscle in her body screaming. She could hear the faint whisper of Camille's trousers, the soft scuff of her shoes on the marble as she moved. The sound was terrifyingly close. She felt exposed, vulnerable, like a specimen under a microscope.
The circling stopped. Camille was directly behind her again. Yanna's back was drenched in a cold sweat. The silence stretched, a taut wire of anticipation. And then, a voice. A soft, disappointed whisper, right next to her ear. The warmth of Camille's breath on her skin was a shocking, intimate violation that made her flinch.
"You're slouching."
Before Yanna could even process the words, she felt it. A touch. A single, cool, strong finger pressed with pinpoint accuracy into the space between her shoulder blades. It was not a violent touch. It wasn't a shove. It was a firm, specific, undeniable pressure. It was charged with an immense, quiet power, a touch that said, I can put my hands on you whenever I wish. Your body is my domain.
A jolt, sharp and electric, shot through Yanna's entire system. It was a supernova of sensation—terror, shock, shame, and something else, something dark and twisted and horrifyingly shameful: a thrill. The direct, physical contact, the focal point of all that power, centered on a single point on her body.
"Posture," Camille's voice whispered again, still close to her ear. "Discipline begins in the body. It is a reflection of the mind."
The finger was removed. The warmth of her presence receded. Yanna heard the soft footsteps walk away, back toward the study, without another word. She was left trembling, her carefully constructed wall of endurance shattered. The humiliation was no longer a general state of being; it was now a sharp, personal, and profoundly physical memory etched into the space between her shoulder blades. This wasn't about her posture. It was about ownership.
The final ten minutes were a descent into a different kind of hell. The brief, shocking interaction had broken her. Her mind, pushed to its absolute limit, began to shatter. The pain in her knees was no longer a localized fire; it was a vast, roaring ocean of white-hot agony that consumed everything. It had no beginning and no end. It was all there was. Her thoughts fragmented into meaningless shards. White wall. Pain. Back straight. Cold floor. Pain. Smell of perfume. Pain. Pain. Pain.
And then, in the crucible of that absolute agony, something strange and fundamental shifted inside her. She detached.
It was a feeling she vaguely recognized, a more potent, overwhelming version of the "floating state" she sought with the sharp edges of her own fingernails. Suddenly, she was no longer in her body. She was somewhere above it, looking down at the pathetic, trembling girl kneeling on a pile of beans, staring at a white wall. She could see her own sweat-dampened hair, the rigid line of her back, the faint tremor in her shoulders. She felt a distant, academic pity for the girl, but she did not feel her pain. The pain was still there, a roaring furnace below her, but it belonged to someone else.
In this broken, dissociative clarity, a new thought bloomed, a dark and terrible flower pushing its way through the scorched earth of her mind. This is better than the anxiety.
The thought was so shocking, so monstrous, that it brought her crashing back into her body for a split second, the full force of the agony returning like a physical blow. But the thought remained. The grinding, all-consuming physical pain had burned away everything else. It had incinerated the messy, complex, gnawing fear about money, about her mother's tired hope, about her sister's medicine, about her own failed future. All that noise was gone.
This was a pure state of being. Simple. Honest. The shame was still there, a deep, foundational layer of her new existence, but it was now intertwined with a dark, thrilling sense of correctness. This was a consequence. A payment. This was what she deserved for her failure. This was her purpose. For a horrifying, lucid second, the thought of the punishment ending was more terrifying than the thought of it continuing. What would she do when the pain stopped? The anxiety would come back. The noise would return. Here, in the heart of the fire, everything was simple. Obey. Endure. Be corrected.
This was the seed. The true and terrible root of her masochism, planted by another's hand, now taking hold in the fertile soil of her broken pride.
A clear, impersonal chime, like the one that had signaled the start of a video call, echoed through the penthouse. It was over.
A moment later, Camille returned. She stopped a few feet away, her arms crossed, her expression once again clinical and detached. Her command was simple.
"Get up."
Yanna tried. She sent the message from her brain to her legs, but nothing happened. Her knees were numb, dead weights of useless flesh. She tried to shift, to push herself up, and a fresh wave of agony, a million tiny needles of fire, shot up her legs as blood rushed back into the abused tissue. A pathetic whimper escaped her lips. Her vision swam. The white wall blurred and tilted.
She fell forward, catching herself with her hands on the cold marble floor, her body trembling uncontrollably. She was a newborn foal, clumsy and weak. Camille watched her struggle with the detached interest of a biologist observing a specimen, offering no help, no word of encouragement. This was part of the lesson. You must overcome the consequences of your own punishment. Alone.
Using the wall for support, her hands splayed against the cool, smooth surface, Yanna managed to haul herself into a swaying, precarious standing position. Her legs were shaking so violently she thought they would give out.
"Let me see," Camille commanded, her voice calm, almost like a doctor's.
Yanna stared at her, uncomprehending.
"Your knees," Camille clarified, her voice edged with impatience. "Let me see them."
With trembling fingers, Yanna reached down and lifted the hem of her black trousers, exposing her ruined flesh to the cool air and the judgment of her owner.
The sight was hideous. Her kneecaps were swollen to twice their normal size, the skin an angry, inflamed red, mottled with the deep purple of bruises that were already forming. And pressed into the swollen flesh were hundreds of tiny, perfect, hideous dimples, the exact shape of the mung beans, making her skin look like some grotesque, alien fruit.
A small, almost imperceptible smile touched the corners of Camille's lips. It was a look of profound, quiet satisfaction.
"Good," she said softly. "A clear lesson, clearly learned. A body that has been educated does not easily forget. You will remember this the next time you consider being tardy."
The words were a verdict, a final stamp on the lesson. Camille turned to leave, her work for the morning apparently done. Then, she paused at the entrance to the hallway and looked back at Yanna, who was still swaying, clutching her trousers, her vision still blurry with pain.
"You will find a dustpan and brush in the utility closet to your left. You will clean every last one of these beans from my floor. Then, you will make me a fresh cup of coffee. The correct way this time. There is a manual in the drawer beneath the machine. You have fifteen minutes."
A beat. Camille glanced at an invisible watch on her wrist, though Yanna knew she was tracking the time in her head. "It is now 8:07. You are already late for your next task. I suggest you learn to move through the pain."
And with that, she was gone, leaving Yanna alone with her ruined knees and her new orders.
Yanna sank back down to the floor, not in punishment this time, but because her legs could no longer support her. She landed on her hands and knees—the very posture of her correction. The movement sent fresh, screaming waves of agony through her legs. Tears, hot and silent, finally began to stream down her face. They were not tears of sadness, or of self-pity, or even of humiliation. They were pure, chemical tears of pain.
She crawled to the utility closet, every movement a fresh torture. She found the dustpan and brush and crawled back to the circle of beans. On her hands and knees, she began to sweep the tiny green instruments of her education into the pan. The irony was a bitter acid in her throat.
But through the haze of pain, there was something else. A stark, terrifying clarity. She had a task. A command. A reason to exist in this sterile, white hell. The cycle of failure, correction, and servitude had begun. And in the terrifying, hollowed-out space where her pride used to be, there was a flicker of something new, something she had just discovered in the depths of her suffering. The profound, addictive calm of absolute obedience